


After the Smoke Clears

by groveofbones



Series: A Skeleton of Fractured Parts [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Soldiers, Developing Friendships, Force-Sensitive Hux, Gen, Hux and Phasma Are Murder BFFs, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-19 16:40:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 41,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13708452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: Hux and Phasma grow up in the First Order, size each other up, forge an alliance, and add another name to their "To-Kill" list.





	1. Hux, 5

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I haven't read any of the tie-in books or consumed any of the franchise except the movies, so the only bits of their canon backstories I know I picked up from snippets on Tumblr. So I kind of just made up my own. Also, because the First Order is a terrible place to grow up, the first and second chapters contain descriptions of child abuse/child soldiers, and the third and fourth chapters contain obliquely (not explicitly) described sexual assault and its emotional aftermath. 
> 
> This is the first time I've ever posted something I've written online, so I hope you like it!

**_Hux, 5_ **

 

He was sometimes shocked at how well he remembered it, given that he was five years old when it happened. 

 

It had been baking day in the kitchen, and his mother had been making loaf after loaf of bread, flour up to her elbows as she punched and kneaded the dough. Every time she got a tray of loaves into the oven, she’d turn to him with a triumphant smile and swipe one hand across her brow in an exaggerated gesture of relief, leaving behind a smear of flour from her eyebrows to the roots of her hair. It made him laugh every time. 

 

She’d set him to work on the mixing bowls, scrubbing them clean in the one of the kitchen’s enormous vats of soapy water and sterilizing fluid. It was one of his favorite jobs. It was satisfying to see the dry, doughy crusts come away from the bowls, and he liked the suds. He occasionally got distracted by them, pausing in his work to draw patterns in the bubbles or try to stack them in his hand. 

 

He was so entranced by his work that he didn’t notice the man’s arrival until a cold voice from the doorway barked, “All of you except Ayena Katri, get out. Now.”

 

He looked up. The other kitchen workers were flooding out through the door leading to the servant’s quarters, casting worried glances back at his mother. The doorway into the main facility was occupied by a tall, broad-shouldered man in the uniform of an Imperial officer. He’d never been this close to an Imperial officer before, and the man even had a blaster in his hand. It looked just like the toy that one of the older kitchen boys constantly showed off but would never let him play with. He was excited and opened his mouth to say so, but stopped when he met the man’s eyes. The officer’s face was dead-eyed and expressionless as he surveyed the now mostly empty kitchen. The blaster was starting to look less like a toy. He couldn’t stop thinking, over and over, _This is real, it’s real, it’s real, it’s real_. 

 

His mother turned to him. She was smiling, but her face was nearly white. The kitchen was always so warm that that struck him as strange. “Go on, love. You heard the man. Go on. Follow the others.”

 

“No,” the officer said, smiling. The smile was not nice. “No, why don’t we let the boy stay, Ayena. We’ve got a lot to talk about.” He snorted with amusement. “You really thought I wouldn’t find out?”

 

“G-General,” his mother stuttered. He couldn’t remember ever hearing her stutter before. His mother was fearless. “What… what are you talking about, sir?”

 

She took a step back, positioning herself between him and the officer. It wasn’t subtle. Her hands were shaking. The officer’s smile widened, baring his teeth. 

 

“A lie by omission is still a lie, Ayena,” he said. “I would have expected better from you. Now why don’t you send that boy over to me so I can get a better look at him.” The officer took a step toward them, and his mother backed up until she could get a hand on him, pushing him behind her. 

 

“He isn’t yours, General,” she said firmly. “I’ve had other lovers. And I was protected with you.”

 

The officer gave her a disgusted look. “I have little doubt that your… assignations have been numerous. But the timing is rather illuminating, don’t you think? And protections do fail sometimes.” As he’d spoken, the officer had been advancing toward them, step by step. His mother had backed him against the side of the vat now. There was nowhere else for them to go. Her hand on his skinny shoulder tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened. There was nowhere to go. 

 

“Now why don’t you be a good girl,” the officer said, taking a final step forward, “and let me have a look at the boy.” With that, the officer shoved his mother out of the way and grabbed him by the arm. He gasped at the bruising tightness of the officer’s grip. 

 

Behind him, his mother whispered, “It’s okay, Armi. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

 

The officer holstered his blaster and took a small scanner out of a pocket on his greatcoat. Armi’s mother made a sound like a wounded animal, but Armi couldn’t look away as the officer passed the scanner over his wrist. The scanner chimed and the officer looked at it with a widening grin. 

 

“Well, would you look at that,” the officer said, tucking the scanner back into his pocket. “He’s mine after all. I’ll be taking him with me when we evacuate this shithole planet.”

 

“No!” his mother cried. “No, you can’t do that, please, he’s my son too and—”

 

She cut off abruptly as, with a quick and practiced movement, the officer drew his blaster again and pointed it directly at Armi’s forehead. Armi couldn’t look anywhere else but at the gray metal muzzle. _This is real, it’s real, it’s real…_

 

“You are in no position to tell my what I can and can’t do, Ayena,” the officer said coldly. “I’m sure there are other whores out there capable of bearing a child. Is that how you want this to end?”

 

His mother only made a choked sound. Armi couldn’t look at her, not with that gun in his face. 

 

The officer laughed and shook his head. “Stupid girl. You tried to hide my property from me. This is really the best possible outcome you could have expected.”

 

With that, the officer holstered his blaster again and turned for the door, dragging Armi behind him and not sparing another glance backward. Armi finally managed to look at his mother. There were tears streaming down her face. He had never seen her cry. He felt something twist in his chest. 

 

“It’s okay,” his mother mouthed at him. “It’ll be okay.”

 

“M-mother,” he managed to stumble out, but that was all before he was dragged through the door and it whooshed closed behind him. 

 

The officer held on to his arm and pulled him through several hallways that passed in a blur, farther and farther away from the kitchens and the servants’ quarters, before finally entering a gray-walled room with a table and chairs in it. As soon as the officer released the grip on his arm, Armi backed into the corner. The officer was between him and the door. 

 

The officer crowded into his personal space, staring down at him expressionlessly. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.

 

“A-Armitage Katri, s-sir,” Armi responded. 

 

The almost casual backhand caught him completely by surprise. White light exploded in his vision as the officer’s knuckles hit him just behind the eye, the impact bouncing his head off the wall next to him. It only turned to pain a moment later, radiating inward from both sides of his skull. He blinked up at the officer, wide-eyed and too shocked even to cry, a hand half raised to his face. The expression, or rather lack thereof, on the officer’s face hadn’t changed at all.

 

“Your name is Hux, because that’s my name, and I’m your father,” the officer said, clearly and evenly. “And if I ever hear you stutter again, I’ll hit you much harder than that. Do you understand me?”

 

Armi nodded wordlessly. 

 

“Good. You’re a general’s son, and you’ll be expected to act accordingly from now on. You’re not legitimate, which is unfortunate and will reflect poorly on me. If my damned wife could manage to do her duty and provide me an heir, I wouldn’t be forced to take these measures, but here we are. If you do anything, anything whatsoever, to make my faith in you look misplaced, if you fail to live up to your potential, there will be very serious consequences. Is that clear?” Armi nodded again. The officer stared him down for a long moment before speaking again. “Arkanis is being evacuated of Imperial personnel; our ship is scheduled to leave in two hours. I’ll take you to it now and you will remain in your berth until I send for you.” The officer turned toward the door.

 

“My mother?” Armi asked carefully, trying his best to keep his voice steady.

 

“You won’t see her again,” the officer responded, without even bothering to look at Armi. “If you ever go looking for her, I’ll have her killed. Come with me.”

 

Armi didn’t cry then, even though his head hurt. He was still so shocked by everything that had happened that it was like all thought had detached from his brain and gone who-knows-where. And besides, the officer’s last statement couldn’t possibly be true. He couldn’t even conceive of never seeing his mother again. He’d seen her every day of his life. It wasn’t his life without her in it.

 

So he merely followed the officer in complete silence down to the docking bay and up the ramp into a ship larger than he’d ever imagined a ship could be. He didn’t say anything as the officer passed him off to a crewman, who led him to a cabin with a bed larger than the ones that Armi and his mother slept on in the servants’ quarters combined. It even had its own refresher and a small window of reinforced plastic through which he could see the bustle of the bay.

 

He looked at his face in the mirror in the refresher, noting the beginnings of a bruise on his cheek. It was easy for him to get bruises. He was pale like his mother, with her red hair; it was the way many natives of Arkanis looked. He didn’t look like his father, and he never would. The thought gave him a fierce burn of satisfaction. 

 

He opened all the drawers in the cabin, which contained more clothes than he’d ever owned, but all in black or gray. Not a single thing in the drawers had any color. Not a single thing in the cabin had any color. It was all black or gray. 

 

He looked out the window for a little while, but then he just curled up on the wide bed, staring at nothing. He didn’t even feel bored. He didn’t feel much of anything. 

 

Two hours passed that way. He finally looked up when the ship began to rumble, powering up and preparing for takeoff. 

 

He had always dreamed of going into space. He was actually going into space at that moment. He should be excited about that, he thought distantly. It seemed to take a tremendous amount of effort to get himself off the bed and over to the window. He watched the bay drop away below him, then the ground, then the entire landmass, until finally he was watching the planet itself drift through a black, star-studded expense. 

 

He had left his mother down there. She was down there, and he was up high above, getting farther away from her by the second. 

 

_No one else calls me Armi_ , he thought, and with that thought, the floor and walls of the cabin seemed to sway. His legs wobbled and he dropped to his knees. No one would ever call him that again. No one would ever be close by if he woke up from a nightmare, no one would ever make him warm milk and honey and tell him a story with all the voices, no one would ever try to make him laugh or point out the little jewel-bright birds that came to the sugar-water feeders outside the kitchen windows or sit and watch the rain with him. 

 

He cried then. For the first time in his life, he tried to keep his crying quiet, his hands pressed tight over his mouth and his body curled in on itself, because he knew no one would want to comfort him if they heard him. He wouldn’t have words until he was older for the emptiness that opened up inside him, but he felt it all the same: the knowledge that he had lost something truly precious, and that nothing in his life would ever feel the same. 

 

***

 

Six years after that, General Brendol Hux’s wife, four months pregnant after years and years of trying, became gravely ill and miscarried. The miscarriage was so violent and so nearly fatal, the doctors regretfully informed her, that it had caused permanent damage to her uterus. She would never be able to become pregnant again. 

 

Armitage Hux was eleven years old and knew exactly what would happen to him if his father should ever have a legitimate heir. And he desperately, desperately wanted to live. 

 

Maratelle Hux demanded a full investigation into whether she had been poisoned. Brendol Hux categorically refused. There was no reason for it, in his mind. The incident had shown him that he already had a suitable heir, after all. 


	2. Phasma, 8

**_Phasma, 8_ **

 

She was sometimes frustrated with how little she remembered about anything before that day. Granted, she had only been eight years old when it had happened.

 

She remembered her mother as a warm, quiet voice that sang her to sleep and told her about the constellations and came in from work on the farmlands with a tired sigh, bringing the smell of cold and threatened snow. She remembered her father as a jovial, loud voice that echoed from behind a dark beard and a smell of pipe smoke and that rumbled under her ear when she curled up on his chest in the mornings, wrapped in his sweater. 

 

She remembered less about her siblings. She was pretty sure she’d had a younger sister and a younger brother, and maybe a second younger brother who had been just a baby. But there were always children around in her memories, the children from neighboring farmsteads who played with her out in the fields and were in and out of each others’ houses. It was hard to tell who was whose. 

 

What her name had been, she did not remember at all. 

 

She had been out playing with a whole group of children, soaking up the last of her planet’s short, meager summer, and hadn’t returned home until dusk, chased out of the fields by the dropping temperature as the weak sun sank behind the hills. She’d been surprised at the sight of a transport tank, low to the ground like an enormous, scuffed-black beetle, parked in front of her house. The sound of raised voices from inside alarmed her, and she’d burst through the door with her younger sister and brother behind her. 

 

Up until that point, she had only seen Stormtroopers in holos. There were four of them in her house. Two of them stood between her parents, as if keeping them apart, and the other two flanked a woman whose uniform was made of stiff black and gray cloth rather than armor. Her mother was standing in front of this woman, her hands balled up at her sides. 

 

“It’s no good lying to us,” the uniformed woman was saying when they came in, “your District Commandant handed over the latest census without a fuss. Ah, and here they are,” the woman said, turning toward the children with an unpleasant smile. “Perfect timing.”

 

Her brother and sister ran to hide behind her mother’s legs, but, because she was the oldest, she stood in front of her mother. She stared up at the uniformed woman angrily, her jaw clenched. She wanted the uniformed woman to understand that it wasn’t okay to make her parents upset. 

 

The uniformed woman merely smirked. Her mother’s hands rested on her shoulders, squeezing tightly. 

 

“You can’t do this,” her mother said. “You _can’t_. We’re citizens of the Republic.”

 

Her father made a move as if to step toward them, but one of the Stormtroopers reached out and grabbed his arm. This was completely unacceptable. She wanted to run over and smack the Stormtrooper on the leg, but her mother was still holding on to her. 

 

“Ah, but the Republic is far away, and the First Order is right here,” the uniformed woman said. “Be reasonable. It’s not as if we’re singling you out, we’re taking the oldest child from every household with children over five. We’re being very fair about this.”

 

“We’re citizens of the Republic,” her mother said again, much more quietly. She wanted to look up at her mother’s face, to reassure herself, but she didn’t. She just kept staring at the uniformed woman, who wrinkled her nose as if disgusted. 

 

“Look, we will be leaving this house with a recruit for the Order. You can either shut up and let us take the oldest child with no further nonsense, or we’ll take _all_ the children. Your choice.”

 

What followed was a long moment of terrible silence. The Stormtroopers didn’t move a muscle, but the ones standing behind the uniformed woman had their hands resting close to the blasters hung on their belts. She could hear her mother’s breathing, which hitched and broke on every inhale. Her mother’s hands were trembling on her shoulders. Even her younger siblings were perfectly quiet. 

 

She wanted to turn, to try to catch sight of her parents’ faces, but she couldn’t look away from the uniformed woman. It was like she was frozen. It was silly how long it had taken to dawn on her that this strange woman wanted _her_ , wanted to take her away from her home. But it seemed ridiculous that she would leave here. Her bed was here, with the little doll her mother had made her out of fabric scraps; where would she sleep if she ever went anywhere else?

 

She knew, at the time and in all the later years that she looked back on that day, that her parents had had no choice, that there was no way she would have been allowed to stay in her home no matter what anyone did. And yet, whenever she did look back, the instant that was the most devastatingly clear in her memory was the moment her mother took her hands off her shoulders and set one on the small of her back, gently, so painfully gently nudging her forward.

 

Time seemed to slow to the pace of winter tree sap as she took a stumbling step toward the uniformed woman. Her mother was whispering something, she thought it might have been an apology, but her ears were ringing. She needed to look back, she knew. It had to be now, she would never get another chance. But she couldn’t do anything but step forward and then step forward again, haltingly. 

 

Her mother had had no choice. But her mother had given her up. 

 

She followed the uniformed woman and the Stormtroopers out of her house. From behind her, as soon as the door closed, came the sounds of wailing. She climbed numbly into the transport. It was already half full of other children, some that she recognized, some that she didn’t, all looking as empty as she felt. 

 

***

 

They took them all back to an enormous, blocky ship that they’d parked out on an empty ridge, from which all the surrounding countryside was visible. The ship was ringed by more Stormtroopers who watched steadily and impassively as the children were led up the ramp onto the ship. The children huddled together in the cargo hold as the ship growled to life and trembled as it took off. Some of them were holding hands. She saw some children that she recognized, but others were strangers. They must have come from all over. 

 

Once the ship was out of the atmosphere, a man in a uniform like that the woman had worn stepped into the hold and ordered the children to line up single-file against the wall. A group of about twelve Stormtroopers assisted, shoving any reluctant or slow children roughly until they were arranged to the man’s satisfaction. The man nodded shortly and gestured to the first child in the line to follow him out of the hold. 

 

As child after child was led out, the line moving forward inch by inch, the children started to whisper fearfully. “They’re going to kill us,” a little girl, probably not much over five, said in an overloud, panicked voice. “They’re taking us out to kill us!” A ripple of shifting and murmuring spread out from her. Someone was crying. Multiple someones. No one dared break ranks, though, not with the Stormtroopers standing so nearby, hands on their blasters. 

 

She wanted to say that the little girl was wrong, that she was being stupid. Why would they bring them all the way there to kill them in orbit? It wasn’t like their parents could have stopped them from shooting them dead right there in their houses. The space between her shoulder blades prickled where her mother had touched her, had pushed her.

 

She didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around, just stood straight-backed. She was the oldest and strongest of her siblings. She had been brave for them, and she could be brave on this ship, too, no matter what was in store for them. 

 

When it was her turn, the man in the uniform led her out of the hold and into a small room, where a different man held a strange-looking tool and gestured her to a low stool in front of him. As she sat, the realized that there were wisps of hair all over the floor around her, and she realized what was going to happen just as the man flicked the razor on and touched it to her head. 

 

She started crying, then. _Stop it, stop it, you’re being stupid, it’s just hair_ , she thought to herself angrily. But the tears just kept sliding down her face as her tangles of golden hair came away from her head and hit the ground. Her mother had always shaken her head at the knots and snarls she accumulated throughout the day, but gently brushed them out every night before bed. 

 

Finally, there was nothing left but the strands that had fallen under her collar and itched against her neck and shoulders. The man with the razor pointed toward a door at the far end of the room. She went in silence. 

 

Behind the door was another room, with a uniformed woman and a sonic refresher chamber. The woman told her to take off her clothes, which she did. The refresher blasted the hair, dirt, and tears off her body, and left her skin feeling strangely like it was ringing or vibrating. When she got back out of the chamber, the woman didn’t give her back her clothes. Instead, she handed her a pile of white linen, which unfolded into a thin tank top and pair of shorts, and a pair of plastic sandals. 

 

“These are the clothes you’ll wear to bed,” the woman said dispassionately. “You’ll have another set for day wear. These clothes aren’t yours, they belong to the First Order, so you’ll be expected not to lose them or cause them more damage than ordinary wear and tear. Put them on quickly and go through that door.” She gestured toward the door she meant. 

 

Behind it was a third room. This room also had a stool and a man with a strange tool. This tool was larger than the razor, and looked like a gun that had had its muzzle replaced with a platform over which an arch of metal hovered. The arch ended in a sharp point like some predator’s stinger. Her heart started to beat faster. 

 

“Sit,” the man ordered. She did so. “Put your hand palm up on the platform.” She did this, too. 

 

There was no warning when the man pulled the trigger of the gun. The arch of metal plunged down, and the point sank into the skin of her wrist. There was an intense, painful pressure that made her gasp, then the point withdrew, leaving a smear of blood behind on her wrist. The man, without looking at her, opened a small package with a sanitized wipe inside and cleaned her blood off the point. 

 

She held her wrist in her other hand, squeezing it tight, as the man said, “Your identification chip has been implanted. You are,” he turned the gun so he could read something off a screen in its stock, “FN-0942. You are now in training to become a Stormtrooper for the First Order. Go through the door behind me and follow the hallway to the end to get to the recruit’s mess.”

 

Her eyes stung as she got off the stool, but she didn’t let any tears fall. She’d done her crying, and she stubbornly refused to give them anything more. The stupid man with his stupid gun was probably expecting her to cry. She refused. 

 

The recruit’s mess was full of children, heads bare, identical in their white clothes. Some shivered, some cried silently. All ate mechanically, not looking up, not talking. 

 

She got a plate of food and sat down. It must have been some kind of nutrient paste; it was thick and completely flavorless and made her feel like there was some sticky residue on her teeth and tongue. Not that she noticed any of that then; she would become very familiar with this particular gruel in the coming days, weeks, months, years. (One of the most persistent rumors that she would hear, until she was promoted too high to have casual conversations with her fellow troopers, was that the first several meals they were given had had a compound in them to blur their memories, make them forget their homes. Privately, she thought that small children probably didn’t need much encouragement to forget homes they would never see again.)

 

She moved spoonful after spoonful from her plate to her mouth, over and over, chewing and swallowing. She felt cold, but not in a way that made her body shiver; she felt as if her mind was cold, slowing down as it froze over. 

 

***

 

She blinked out of her stupor hours later, lying on a cot in a dormitory cabin with fifty or so other girls. She sat up. It felt like she was waking up, even though she hadn’t closed her eyes. 

 

The cabin was mostly quiet, with here and there a few muffled sniffles and whimpers. She had the sudden, irresistible urge to get up and find a window. There would probably be precious few on the ship, and she didn’t know what kind of trouble she’d get into if she were caught, but she couldn’t stay there. She felt unreal, like a character in a story, like a doll being used in some very strange game of make-believe, and she had to know there was a world beyond this horrible ship. 

 

She slipped from her bed and, ignoring the sandals she’d stashed under it, padded barefoot between the rows of bunks to the door of the cabin. A thin beam of light stabbed into the room in the moment it took for her to open it and squeeze through, but she was so focused on her mission that she didn’t worry about someone telling on her. She didn’t need to worry, anyway, as she would realize later. For the moment, at least, the children were all allies, but that would change as soon as their training started in earnest. Once rewards and punishments were introduced, they would start turning on each other. 

 

But for that night, she was lucky. No one told their uniformed watchers that she had left the cabin, and she managed, with little wandering, to find a large room near the prow of the ship with a wide bank of windows, for observation, perhaps, or to help crewmen with the claustrophobia of shipboard life. 

 

She stood in the room, her reflection superimposed on the stars: skinny and small, bald, dressed in insubstantial clothes, one wrist angry red and swollen, both fists clenched at her sides. She didn’t look intimidating. She didn’t look strong. She didn’t look brave. 

 

She ground her teeth together and narrowed her eyes as she looked past her reflection, watching the stars, the blacks and whites and occasional colors of space. _I was strong and brave at home_ , she thought, squaring her shoulders. _Why should I be any different here?_

 

She wouldn’t be. Her life would be different on this ship, from now on. But she wouldn’t be different. She wouldn’t let herself. 


	3. Hux, 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This is the first of the two chapters that contain sexual assault. It also contains original character death.
> 
> Also, I have very little knowledge of electronics. However, the fire suppression system is based on a real and mildly terrifying fire suppression system at a Special Collections library where I worked for a semester.

**_Hux, 14_ **

 

He held the TIE fighter holo in place with his right hand while his left hand scrolled through the operating system he’d been working on for the past five weeks. Something was wrong with the code; the entire system crashed every time he simulated starting the warmup sequence for the fighter’s main weapons. 

 

He looked desperately back at the holo of the fighter, where his splayed fingers held it exploded, each component visible. He really wanted to find some kind of answer in the mechanical plans; the interworking of physical parts had always seemed so much more sensible and straightforward to him than code. But he knew the solution wasn’t there, so he sighed and withdrew his hand from the holo field, allowing the plans to collapse back down to a simple image of the fighter. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the image and blew up the code editing screen. 

 

He’d just have to go through his damned code again, looking carefully for the mistake he’d made. All 3,782,531 lines of it. 

 

Not for the first time, he considered giving up. This project was not on the curriculum for any of his classes. But his programming instructor was a wizened, bitter old asshole who had once dismissively told Hux that “showing promise as a _mechanic_ doesn’t mean you can master something as elegant as programming.” It had been a fight not to show any visible reaction to the scorn put on the word “mechanic.” All students at the First Order’s Academy who were on the Command Track were required to have a secondary area of specialization, and apparently Ship and Weapons Engineering didn’t meet Instructor Karo’s exacting standards. 

 

Hux frowned. Instructor Karo was a half-senile idiot, but his opinion would still hold weight when it came to Hux’s marks and potential for advancement along the Command Track. But Karo often waxed rhapsodic about the operating systems in the classic Imperial ships. Apparently, they were the most beautiful, perfectly functional, on and on and on in that vein. The windbag could waste twenty minutes on talk like that. If Hux could construct a working operating system for one of those ship without consulting the existing code…

 

Well, at the very least it would shut Karo up. 

 

The timer buzzed at him and the holo shut down. He scowled. The workrooms were only reservable in hour-long increments, and with so many students, it was almost impossible to reserve two blocks in a row. Working on his small datapad was much more inconvenient, but it would have to do. He’d be able to put in another two hours of work before dinner if he hurried back to his room now. He scooped up his school bag, containing his datapad and a very basic multipurpose tool that he carried with him just in case, from the floor and headed out into the hallway. 

 

On the way, he stopped in front of the test rankings wall, his heart picking up speed as he approached it. The last exam had been a week before; today would be the first day that the rankings would be updated with its results. He caught his breath when he found his name. He was still at the top of his year. He felt a relief so overwhelming that it didn’t leave any room in his mind for things like satisfaction or pride. His father expected the best, and it wouldn’t be good to disappoint him.

 

For a moment, all he could do was stare and blink, letting the wobbliness and light-headedness that he always felt when checking the rankings wall run its course. He hoped his face didn’t look too slack-jawed and stupid. Not that there was anyone around to see, but he was supposed to avoid the habit of letting your emotions show on your face, and he had never been particularly good at hiding his feelings save by effort and concentration. He shook his head and forced himself to move. He still had work to do, he couldn’t waste time. 

 

He heard a familiar set of voices behind him and froze, his stomach lurching. Then he took off running, rounding a corner and ducking into a storeroom. He waited, leaning against the door, his heart pounding, trying to listen to what was going on in the hallway beyond.

 

He had become very finely attuned to the sounds of Sorken Nol laughing with his stupid cronies. Nol was a bulky, beady-eyed fuckwit who was always accompanied by his three equally dim hangers-on, Ten Arkos, Gatra Arayin, and Konender Sedge. The four of them were constantly on the alert for someone to antagonize. The problem, as Hux had been made well aware by excruciatingly extensive experience, was that there was no way he could beat any one of them, let alone all four, in a fight. A rather dramatic growth spurt may have left him the tallest person in his year, but it had also left him gangly, scrawny, and perpetually at risk of tripping over his own feet. He was lucky that Command Track students didn’t have their hand-to-hand combat scores factored into their overall rankings, or he would have been dealing with his father’s disapproval. He was a pretty good shot with a blaster, but unfortunately, openly killing fellow students was not something that the Academy looked on kindly. He’d debated trying to poison Nol’s food, but the difficulties had stacked up too quickly.

 

He pressed his ear harder against the door, eyes narrowed and one hand over his mouth. He didn’t hear anything. He’d have to risk it; it wasn’t as if he could spend all day in the stupid storeroom. Although, he did have his datapad with him… No, that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t be trapped in here just on the off chance that they were out there. 

 

He cracked the door and peered out. No one. They must have gone another way. His let out a breath that he’d been holding and hurried out of the room, heading in the direction of his room. He really hadn’t wanted them to see him at the rankings wall, partly because he had somehow developed a reputation for not caring at all about his marks and just achieving them effortlessly, and he wanted to cultivate it. But mostly because Nol hated him for always topping the rankings for their year, and he was scared—concerned, he corrected himself, he couldn’t be scared—that seeing him and the rankings in the same place would remind Nol of that enmity. 

 

He didn’t relax until he was behind the closed door of his room. It wasn’t as if he could lock himself in, the Academy didn’t allow its students locking doors, but at least he was out of sight. He settled down on his bed with his datapad in hand, resigning himself to a slog back through his code. 

 

Come to think of it… He had a small stash of nutrient bars in his desk. He could just skip dinner. That would give him more time to work. And, although this was, of course, a lesser concern, it had the added benefit of keeping him far away from Nol’s attention. 

 

Yes, skipping dinner was definitely the best course of action. 

 

***

 

He was dozing off when he heard the click of his door opening, and for a moment he thought that the sound was something in a dream. 

 

Then he heard the rustling of people moving nearby, and snapped out of sleep as if he’d had cold water dumped over him. The door clicked shut again behind the intruders. 

 

Hux sat up and swung his legs over the edge of his bed, reaching to flip on his bedside lamp. He felt like every one of his muscles was tensed for a fight. He didn’t feel any better when he saw that the intruders were Nol and his followers. Nol grinned at him. 

 

“We saw you run away from us today,” Nol said. “You actually hid somewhere to avoid talking to us. That wasn’t very nice.” One of his idiot friends snickered. “And you even skipped dinner. We’re starting to think you don’t like us. So we thought we’d come see you ourselves.”

 

“You must be very, very stupid,” Hux said, as evenly as he could. “Even stupider than I thought. Whatever you’re planning to do, all I have to do is get the Watch Officer and tell them you were in my room. You’ll be thrown out of the Academy.”

 

Nol shrugged and looked to each side, at his friends. They were all matching his grin. “See, we thought that, too, at first. We were actually a bit worried the first time we kicked the shit out of you. We thought you’d go running to your daddy, and he’d come after us. It’s obvious the only reason you’re here is because your daddy pulls strings for you.”

 

Hux bristled. He wanted to come up with something clever and cutting to say in response, but he was slowly being overtaken by a frigid, paralyzing feeling of dread. 

 

“But nothing happened to us,” Nol went on. “Nothing was ever going to happen to us. What do the Instructors keep telling us? A commanding officer has to be in control of the situation at all times? So we started to think that maybe you couldn’t run back to daddy after all. Maybe if you told him you were getting your poor, skinny little ass kicked, he’d be just oh so disappointed in you.”

 

_Oh, shit. Oh, fuck_. Nol was more perceptive than Hux had thought. The truth of his statement echoed around Hux’s head. There was no way that Hux could admit to his father that he was getting into fights at all, let alone losing them. 

 

There was no one he could tell, no one he could ask for help. He was outnumbered four to one. And they were blocking the only way out of the room. 

 

He shot up from his seat on the bed and barreled toward them, hoping to catch them by surprise, push his way between them, and get out the door. He had long legs, if he could stay on his feet he could probably outrun them. Maybe he could find somewhere to hide, like he had that afternoon…

 

He didn’t even manage to get a hand on the door. As he tried to push between them, Arkos and Sedge grabbed his arms with no trouble and threw him to the floor, laughing. He flipped onto his stomach, trying to push himself up, but someone landed on his back, driving their knee into his spine, crushing him to the floor and knocking the wind out of him. His wrists were grabbed and pulled away from his body, and when he tried to kick out, someone else grabbed his ankles. 

 

He kept struggling, lurching this way and that trying to pull himself free from the hands all over him, until the person on his back, probably Nol from the weight of him, grabbed the back of his head with one big hand and slammed his face into the floor, once, twice, three times. Lights exploded in his skull, and his movements turned into uncoordinated twitches. 

 

Nol leaned down and whispered in his ear, “You’re so fucking full of yourself, you little prick. You think you’re so much better than everyone else, but here you are. _Look_ at where you are. We could kill you right now and there probably isn’t a single person who’d care. We’d probably get a fucking medal.” One of Nol’s friends laughed. Hux couldn’t move, his head was swimming, he was having trouble breathing. If they did end up killing him, the only reason the Academy would even investigate would be to appease his father for the loss of an asset. He probably wasn’t even the most important asset that his father possessed. 

 

Nol sat back. There was a long moment where no one said anything. When Nol spoke again, Hux could practically hear the smile on his face. 

 

“Hold him down. I have an idea.”

 

***

 

Hux wanted to scream, but he didn’t. He didn’t make a sound.

 

***

 

After they left, he lay on the floor for a long time, shivering, and then he got up and went into the refresher chamber and set it to a water shower and turned it up as hot as it would go and stood under the water, shivering, and then he got into his bed and piled every blanket he had on top of him and lay there watching the darkness, shivering, and he shivered and shivered and couldn’t get warm. 

 

“Four,” he whispered to himself. “Four, four, four, four.” There had been four of them. He couldn’t tell anyone what they’d done, and no one would hurt them for him. And he desperately wanted them to be hurt. So he would have to do it himself. 

 

Sorken Nol. Ten Arkos. Gatra Arayin. Konender Sedge. 

 

He’d have to hurt them himself. 

 

Sorken Nol. Ten Arkos. Gatra Arayin. Konender Sedge. Four. Four. Four. Four.

 

Zero down. Four to go.

 

***

 

The next day, he got up when his alarm went off, washed and dressed, went to class. No one acted any differently. The students in the rooms near his had probably heard Nol and his crew laughing, had probably heard the thuds when Hux was thrown to the ground, but none of them liked him enough to wonder what had happened. 

 

Everyone was exactly the same except for him. 

 

He kept his head down and stayed quiet. It wasn’t that hard. He felt detached from his own body, as if it was a ship that he was remote piloting from somewhere far away. It seemed like every part of him hurt, but he pushed his body as if it was just a machine that he wanted to get the most out of before it broke down. It took a second for him to react to everything he saw and heard around him, as if his life was being transmitted to him on a lagging signal. When people brushed against him in the hallways or the classrooms, his mind reacted with pure revulsion, but he was too cut off from his body to flinch or move away from them or do anything else. 

 

The disembodied feeling lasted throughout the following weeks, as the days blurred into a gray sludge of fuzzy memory. He finished the operating system he’d been working on; one night he started going through the code and found the error within three hours, and then he just kept going until it was time to go to class the following morning, cleaning things up and proofreading everything he’d written. He didn’t even feel tired. A couple of days later, he showed the completed code to Instructor Karo, who grudgingly complimented his work but was obviously very impressed. Hux nodded and thanked the Instructor and went back to his room and thought that he should probably be happy about what he’d accomplished. 

 

Another night, he drifted off into blankness and came to having dismantled the terminal in his room and arrayed the individual components around himself in order of size. This wasn’t enormously surprising; it was something he’d done several times since arriving at the Academy, excited to learn about any and everything mechanical. He noticed with dispassion that he’d burned one of his fingers, and a blister was starting to form. His terminal was one of the old ones that were haphazardly being replaced all over the school; they tended to spark if you messed with them, and pieces were always coming loose. He was careful when he put the terminal back together. 

 

The detachment was irritating, in that it made it harder to organize his thoughts and make plans, but it didn’t interfere with his schoolwork, and it wasn’t like he’d never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t the first time he’d removed himself, so to speak, from a situation that bothered him, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. What was more worrying to him was that the detachment seemed to alternate with strange periods of something almost like elation. 

 

He told himself that Nol and his cronies had hurt him, and there was nothing for him to feel elated about. But his decision to hurt them back had given him a mission, a feeling of purpose that was secret and personal and belonged to him alone. Accomplishing this task wouldn’t reflect on his father or his family or affect anyone but him. The task was his own prized possession, that he didn’t have to share with anyone else. 

 

He dreaded the elated feeling starting up again, because it would build and build until he felt like his skin was buzzing and he was checking every corner around him for something that could help him in his task. It was like the opposite of the detachment: he was _too_ present in his own body. He scratched at his arms and left red lines under his shirt sleeves, he bit the inside of his mouth and his tongue until they bled, and, when he reached the top of the build, he was always dropped again, and would come back to himself staring at a wall, so tired he could barely move.

 

These moments, the desolation after the high was gone, scared him the most, because they came with the eerie feeling that he wasn’t alone in his own mind. There was something else in there with him, a presence that communicated its intentions so effectively that it might as well have been a voice speaking in actual words. 

 

It was a promise of power. All it wanted was to be used, to be embraced and made a part of him, and if he did that, he would be able to complete his task with no trouble. Hurting Nol and the others, hurting anyone that he wanted, would be as easy as reaching out a hand. He would be able to achieve anything that he wanted. He would never fear failing his father again; he would immediately surpass his father in every way that mattered. No one would ever be able to hurt him again. 

 

But he knew very well that no offer came without strings. As his father liked to say, _There is no such thing as a gift_. No one would give without wanting something in return. He had no idea what would happen to him if he embraced whatever it was in his mind in these moments, but he was very aware that this offer of power came hand-in-hand with an offer to fundamentally change him. 

 

It became harder and harder to shake off the thoughts, to force down whatever was making the offer, with each drop from the heights of manic exhilaration. 

 

Three and a half weeks passed in that way, until an evening when he decided to go to the Special Records Library after most of the other students were in bed. He had been assigned a research project in a class that he shared with most of the other students in his year, and he was hoping, as he headed out with his school bag slung over his shoulder, that going this late would help him avoid crossing paths with anyone else. 

 

Unfortunately, as he approached the door to Special Records, he could see that it had been propped open. Someone else must have had his idea. 

 

Technically, they weren’t supposed to prop the door to Special Records open, but most students did when they thought they could get away with it. Unlike the regular library, Special Records contained data files and machines that were old enough or rare enough to require additional protection. The room in which they were held had, therefore, been fitted with a state-of-the-art fire suppression system. If fire was detected, the door immediately latched shut, and all the oxygen was sucked out of the room. Keeping the door propped defeated the purpose of the system, but most of the students valued their own lives above the safety of the Special Records. The Academy obviously had different priorities. 

 

Hux frowned, wondering to himself whether it was worth risking interaction with another person, when he heard whoever it was muttering to themselves inside. And he recognized the voice. 

 

His entire body went cold, and he stepped through the door into Special Records as if he was being pulled forward on a track. Just inside the door was a line of older-model terminals containing the catalogue. Ten Arkos was standing at the farthest terminal, with his back to the door. He hadn’t seen Hux come in. As Hux watched, Arkos found what he was looking for and stepped away from the terminal, into the stacks. 

 

He needed to go. He needed to get the hell out of here. He had successfully avoided being too close to any of Nol’s little gang the past three weeks, and he really didn’t want to be caught alone by one of them. 

 

As he turned to go, his eyes fell on the terminal closest to the door. The Special Records Library was constantly being put at the top of the schedule for replacement of its terminals, and constantly being pushed back by projects that the Academy’s rich and powerful patrons liked more, so the terminal was one of the old models… the old models that tended to spark if you messed with them. 

 

His brain clicked into severe clarity so abruptly that it was almost disorienting. He didn’t have very much time. He took out his multitool and slung his bag into the hallway beyond the door, the knelt in front of the terminal. He’d have to do this carefully. He lifted off the access panel and selected a thick clump of wires, melting off the protective plastic and fraying down their surfaces. There would be no way to hide that the terminal had been tampered with, so he made sure that the damage he was doing was clumsy, haphazard. Completely different than his usual meticulousness. He didn’t think he’d ever worked so quickly. 

 

“Hux?” came a voice behind him. “What are you doing?” He looked up from his work. His heart didn’t even speed up; he’d never felt so completely in control of himself before. 

 

Arkos looked at him in complete confusion, but something in the look on Hux’s face must have tipped him off to the fact that this situation was very bad for him. He looked more closely at Hux’s hands, where they were buried in the machinery of the terminal. “Wait, what… what _are_ you doing?” 

 

Hux grinned up at him and didn’t answer. The melting plastic and metal was starting to give off a tiny whisp of smoke. He flicked off the multitool and tossed it into the hallway. 

 

“Wait, you can’t…” Arkos sized up the room, realizing how much closer Hux was to the door than he was, realizing that Hux was blocking his only means of escape. _There_ , Hux thought to himself, _now you know how it feels_. 

 

“Look, I’m sorry,” Arkos tried again, sounding desperate. “I’m sorry for what we did, we were just being stupid, we didn’t mean for it to go that far. It was Nol, he…” Arkos cut off as Hux stood, keeping one hand on the wires, and angled his body toward the door. For a second, he hesitated.

 

“Armitage,” Arkos said, his last-ditch effort. 

 

This was precisely the wrong thing to say. 

 

“Goodbye, Ten,” Hux said, pressing the wires together, feeling the bite of the spark against his fingers, and dropping them back into the machine before whirling out the door, kicking away the doorstop as he went. The door slammed shut behind him with ecstatic finality, and a second later, the alarm went up from inside the Special Records Library, and Hux could hear the beating of Arkos’ fists against the door. 

 

He grabbed his multitool and bag off the floor and hurried away, feeling present and steady in a way he hadn’t in what felt like forever. He didn’t need any power other than his own mind. He didn’t need any ally but himself. An entire lifetime of work and struggle, of striving and planning, stretched out before him, and for the first time, the thought didn’t frighten him. 

 

He felt that strange presence in the back of his mind uncoiling, stretching out to his consciousness, offering its siren song of power and security. He crushed it down as forcefully as he could; he didn’t need it. He was enough on his own. 

 

“One,” he whispered to himself.

 

The next day, the Academy Headmaster called an assembly to announce Arkos’ death and make a show of commiserating with the students. The conclusion of the Academy’s investigation was that Arkos himself had tampered with the terminal, either as a prank or to try to get around the content access blocks, and had accidentally set off a spark, so the assembly also provided an opportunity to warn about the risks of damaging Academy property and shift the blame away from the outmoded equipment. 

 

Hux made sure to catch Nol’s, Arayin’s, and Sedge’s eyes, each in turn, and smile brightly at them. He knew by the nervous looks they exchanged that they understood: the game had changed. 


	4. Phasma, 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This is the other chapter that contains sexual assault.

**_Phasma, 19_ **

 

She had been capable of handling two-on-one matches for several years against any but her most skilled fellow Stormtroopers, so it wasn’t that big of a surprise when Captain Irus told her to give three-on-one a try. She was somewhat surprised that he had the other Stormtroopers stop what they were doing to watch. She didn’t frown, obviously, but she was irritated. She didn’t really like being part of demonstration bouts; she’d always learned better from doing than watching, and she assumed that her fellow troopers were the same. But she would do what she was ordered to. 

 

She stood on one side of the raised demonstration mat, holding her quarterstaff horizontally, facing FN-0811, FN-1291, and FN-1763, who stood in a line across from her. 

 

“At your leisure, FN-0942,” Captain Irus said, inclining his head to her. 

 

Depending on her opponents, in two-on-one matches, she would start with a feint to see what her opponents’ strategy was and how well they would work together. But in this case, she was fairly certain that the strategy would be to try to surround her in a triangle, and she didn’t want to give them the opportunity. 

 

FN-1763, on the right side of the line, was the smallest and the most obvious target, so she feinted in that direction, then switched and attacked FN-0811, on the far left. He raised his staff hurriedly, but he was off-balance and clumsy, and she had the advantage of height and reach over most of her fellow troopers, male or female. She hit her staff against his as hard as she could, knocking down his hands and shoving him back, then stretched out one foot to catch the back of his ankle, using the downward momentum she’d already achieved to push him to the mat, vault over him, and spin to face FN-1291 and FN-1763 as they came at her. 

 

They put up a valiant effort. She was proud of them. They instinctively fell into the best strategy, two troopers keeping her attention from the front while one was always trying to get behind her. Her one complaint was that they kept having FN-1763 be the one to try to get into her blind spot, apparently in the belief that the smallest target would be the most readily overlooked. However, it made their actions predictable. She’d have to talk to them about it after the bout was over. 

 

They certainly landed a few painful hits. She’d have some pretty impressive bruises. But they never got her off her feet; she was very good at using her natural advantages, her bulk and reach, which made it difficult for her opponents to get close to her without her being able to hit them or drive them to the mat. In the end, the timer signaling the end of the bout went off without her hitting the ground (although she’d been close to losing her balance a couple of times; she would tell the other three how well they’d done once there wasn’t an officer nearby to overhear her talk about her own weakness). 

 

“Thank you for the demonstration, all of you,” Captain Irus said impassively. “Training is over for the day. Get cleaned up, all of you. FN-0942, please come to Meeting Room 1 in 30 minutes.”

 

The Stormtroopers looked around at each other in confusion. There were still 50 more scheduled minutes of training time, and it was unusual for Captain Irus to let them go early. FN-0942 just shrugged. If she got a bit more time to herself, she wouldn’t look too closely at the unexpected gift. Although she did wish she had a better idea of what to expect from this meeting. She didn’t like going into potentially dangerous situations with incomplete intelligence. 

 

In the showers, she yelled to her opponents, “You almost had me off my feet a couple of times!” 

 

FN-0811 grinned in a way that completely transformed his brutal, sharp-boned face. “I thought we did! You hid it well, but you couldn’t fool me, Forty-Two!” 

 

She laughed at him. They had given them actual water for the showers today, and it was even hot. Between that and the comfortably worn out feeling of her muscles, she felt quite content, even with the looming meeting. She magnanimously decided to offer her critiques of their strategy later. 

 

She spent her windfall of free time cleaning up the wording in her encyclopedia. All Stormtroopers were given a cheap, several-decades-old datapad and allowed to keep one personal document saved on it. Most troopers kept a journal, but FN-0942 had decided to make an encyclopedia of all the plants she remembered from her home planet. Her parents had been teaching her about the uses and value of everything that they grew and everything that they gathered from the surrounding scrub forests. For some reason, she had forgotten most of the individual events from her life before she’d become a Stormtrooper, but she remembered routines, chores, and things that she had done over and over and over again. 

 

So she had written up everything she remembered about individual plants, caring for them, harvesting them, and using them. She’d even added to it, with basic descriptions of interesting trees, grasses, and flowers that she’d seen on the planets where she’d had missions. Most of any mission was sitting around waiting, either for orders or for enemies, and she had to fill that time somehow. 

 

Her datapad beeped at her five minutes before she was scheduled to meet Captain Irus. She shut it down and put on her armor, strapping her duty weapon to her hip and heading out to Meeting Room 1. 

 

She was surprised to see that she wasn’t the only Stormtrooper there. She did a quick count. Including herself, there were eighteen Stormtroopers present. As they waited, another six filed in after her. There were twenty-four divisions in the Stormtrooper army. 

 

Captain Irus stood at the front of the room, beside another man in the uniform of a Colonel. FN-0942 had never seen him before. He looked to be a bit older than Captain Irus, she guessed about fifty or sixty, and held his parade-rest stance lazily. 

 

Captain Irus cleared his throat and shifted a bit, glancing at the Colonel before beginning. “Troopers, you may have noticed your numbers. One of you has been chosen from each division. Some of you have been summoned from assignments or remote postings to be here, so I trust you’ll understand the importance of this announcement. General Hux has decided that a change in the terms of your service is warranted.”

 

None of the assembled troopers moved, but FN-0942 imagined that the pronouncement had grabbed everyone’s attention. General Brendol Hux was the architect of the Stormtrooper program as it currently operated. For all intents and purposes, the General was the man who had built her. The mention of a change in their terms of service made her feel a bit as if the floor had shifted under her.

 

Captain Irus continued, “It has been decided that each of the divisions should have its own commanding officer chosen from within its ranks.” One or two of the assembled troopers did shift and straighten in surprise at that, although FN-0942 was not one of them. There had never been any suggestion that Stormtroopers could hope to be promoted into the officer ranks. 

 

“I’ve spent the past few months evaluating the troopers of each division in terms of their fighting skill and ability, and have personally recommended each of you for promotion to the rank of Lieutenant.” FN-0942 supposed she was meant to feel grateful or proud at that, but her first response was annoyance. There was more to leadership than fighting skills, she’d always assumed; why should the Stormtrooper officers be evaluated any differently?

 

Captain Irus gestured to the Colonel. “You will all now report to Colonel Vengal, who will be evaluating the success of these promotions. This new practice will necessarily be experimental until its benefits can be determined, so we expect the utmost service from all of you. I hope that you will behave in a manner that reflects well on yourselves, on the Stormtrooper program, and on the First Order.” 

 

“Sir!” the assembled troopers said, snapping into a salute. Captain Irus nodded sharply and stepped back, yielding the floor to Colonel Vengal who smiled with a lot of teeth. 

 

“Troopers, this is a great opportunity for you, and a sign of how important the Stormtrooper program is to the First Order’s operations as a whole. I’m sure you are all feel the weight of this honor, and I look forward to working with you and evaluating your operations. Given the increased responsibilities of your officerships, it has been decided that you should also have some perks to go along with the position. First, you will have increased data storage space added to your personal datapads, as well as limited access to the First Order’s library systems. Second, you will have the option to retire your identification number and be referred to by a name of your choice. Thank you for your service, troopers. Please return to your barracks or your temporary shipboard accommodations. Announcements will be made to each of your divisions, so please do not discuss this meeting with anyone before that time.”

 

The troopers saluted and filed out, splitting up in the hallway in complete, stunned silence. FN-0942 felt like she was buzzing with energy. She was going to be in command of the FN division. She had been chosen out of all her fellow FN troopers. 

 

She had no idea how to lead. She’d spent eleven years learning how to follow. Part of her was utterly terrified. But, she realized, her years of service, her years of improving herself and of trying to do her best for the Order, they were all leading to this. She was strong and competent; her troopers (already she called them her troopers in her mind) deserved a strong and competent commanding officer, and she…

 

She let herself think it: she deserved this. She deserved to be a Lieutenant. She was going to be good at this. 

 

***

 

Captain Irus came to the FN barracks later that day to make the announcement. She’d had to keep mum, evading questions from her fellow troopers, and she felt light on her feet as she headed to the barracks assembly hall.

 

Not that she let it show, of course. She was an officer now, an _officer_ , of all things, so she needed to be even more in control of herself. 

 

She waited on the edge of the assembly hall so she could get to the front easily. A little ways away from her, a couple of non-Stormtrooper Lieutenants (she had a tendency to think of them as “civilians”, even though they were just as much a part of this military force as she was), were talking in low voices. To calm her nerves and excitement, she focused on their conversation. 

 

“I can’t believe they’re making Stormtrooper officers,” one of them was saying. Her heart jumped at the mention; she couldn’t believe it either. “It’s like giving a commission to one of your attack dogs.”

 

The other snorted with laughter. “Well,” he said, “who better to put in charge of the whole pack of them?”

 

She felt as if a little of the excitement had been sucked out of the situation by their words. This made her quietly furious, and as Captain Irus stepped up in front of the FN division, she tried to force herself back to the light feeling she’d had just a moment before. 

 

Captain Irus did not make any kind of grand speech. He introduced the change briskly and gestured to FN-0942 to come up and stand beside him. As she did, she scanned the faces of the other FN troopers, her troopers, some of whom she’d known since she was taken eleven years before. 

 

Some of them looked happy. But most had their brows furrowed in thought or their eyes narrowed. They were calculating, working the change in her position into their own plans and their own strategies for self-protection. 

 

For the first time, she realized what commanding her fellow troopers would mean. The space between them seemed to grow wider and deeper and emptier by the moment. 

 

She pushed those thoughts out of her head. Her troopers deserved a strong and competent commanding officer, and she deserved to be a Lieutenant. 

 

***

 

Each of the new Lieutenants was given a private room with a tiny attached refresher. As soon as the door closed behind her that night, she gaped around at it like a landed fish. Even before she’d been a Stormtrooper, there had never been a time where she hadn’t shared her bedroom and refresher. She settled down on the bed, but was surprised again every time she looked up and realized that there weren’t any other beds in the room. She’d be alone every night. 

 

The first thing she did was power up her datapad and try out the new access to the libraries. She actually gasped out loud when she realized she had access to 262 documents. It felt like the whole world was at her fingertips. Most of them were military in nature, either tactical treatises or engineering manuals of ships or weapons, but she managed to find a couple of botanical texts, too. She read them until her eyes were grainy and she admitted to herself that she had to sleep. 

 

After that, her days started to fill up in ways that she hadn’t anticipated. She had actual messages on her datapad, requests for information and suggestions for assigning FN troopers to missions. She had to send daily updates to Colonel Vengal. She was supposed to supervise her troopers’ training, so she had to set aside extra time so that she could actually train herself. By unspoken agreement, she trained with the other Stormtrooper Lieutenants; it just seemed to make more sense for them to spend time with each other. They never talked about the realization they were all slowly coming to: that this promotion had put up a barrier between them and the other troopers in their divisions. 

 

But although their new training, responsibilities, and situations were much on their minds, the main topic of conversation among the Lieutenants was their names. They had been given two weeks to come up with the name that would represent them for the rest of their lives.

 

Two of the Lieutenants submitted their names almost immediately, claiming that they were the names their parents had given them, before they’d been taken as Stormtroopers. Given the amount of information about their previous lives that Stormtroopers almost universally forgot, FN-0942 doubted this very much, but she didn’t say anything. Let them have their delusions. 

 

A couple of others came up with two-part names, first and last, like those of any other officer. FN-0942 found this even more ridiculous. It wasn’t as if anyone would ever be fooled, would ever forget that they were Stormtroopers. _It’s like giving a commission to one of your attack dogs_. 

 

Many chose words that they thought represented something important to them. One quiet, solemn boy chose Alloy, because alloys were stronger and more useful than their component parts individually. A short, large-eyed girl, who looked delicate but who FN-0942 knew from experience threw a devastating cross, chose Nova, because of how much she loved the stars. 

 

For her own part, FN-0942 didn’t want to use a word. She wanted something completely unique, something that had never belonged to anyone or anything but her. She stood in front of the little mirror in her refresher every night, trying out different combinations of syllables, moving through the alphabet purposefully, seeing how they sounded, how they felt to form, how they looked. 

 

When she stumbled on the perfect name, she knew it immediately. She didn’t have to try anything else. It struck her as feminine, beautiful rather than pretty, but with just a hint of menace and threat. It made her feel like the heroine of a story. It made her feel like a well-crafted weapon. And it started with an “f” sound, like the number she’d become so familiar with. She wasn’t leaving behind any part of herself, she was just changing. Metamorphosing.  

 

She whispered her new name to herself as she hurried back to her datapad to submit it. “Phasma, Phasma, Phasma.” She smiled. It was a good name. She’d be happy to carry it. 

 

***

 

Two weeks of adjustment to the new command system was all that would be given to the Stormtroopers. They had to be dispersed across the galaxy to various missions, to be overseen directly by the new Lieutenants and remotely by Colonel Vengal. It was time to start proving themselves, demonstrating that the First Order was right to place this trust in them. 

 

The day before the troopers were set to depart for their missions, Phasma received a message from Colonel Vengal asking her to come to his private quarters to discuss the readiness of the FN troopers. At the time, she didn’t even wonder why he didn’t just use one of the meeting rooms, or even come down to the training rooms to get her assessment on the spot. She didn’t think about it at all. She was happy with her troopers’ discipline and skill, and she was impatient for her first assignment as an officer. All she could think about was how proud she would be to tell all of that to Colonel Vengal. 

 

On her way out of the part of the ship where the Stormtroopers were quartered, she saw Nova, leaning against a wall and staring into space. That struck her as strange. Nova was sharp-minded and seemed to be constantly in motion. 

 

Phasma liked Nova, probably more than any of the other Lieutenants. And she was a bit early for the meeting with the Colonel, so she walked over to stand in front of Nova. 

 

“Lieutenant Nova,” she said politely. “Anything on your mind?”

 

Nova blinked, as if coming out of deep concentration. “Lieutenant Phasma,” she responded. “I’m sorry, what was your question?”

 

Phasma frowned. “I just wanted to check if you were alright. Is there anything bothering you?”

 

Nova hesitated, then shook her head. “No, nothing. Just planning. You must be, too, right?” She smiled, thinly. It was not very much like her usual smile.

 

Phasma nodded. “Planning is basically all I can think about, at this point. I’m on my way to see Colonel Vengal, he wants to discuss my FNs.”

 

Nova clenched her jaw very hard. “You’re going to see Colonel Vengal? He asked you to?”

 

Phasma nodded again, confused. Nova looked at her for a long moment, then smiled again. This time her smile was soft. Then, to Phasma’s complete surprise, she reached out and gently touched Phasma’s hand with the tips of her fingers.

 

“Good luck on your mission, Lieutenant Phasma,” she said. “Not that you need it. You’re very good at what you do. It’s been an honor training with you. I hope we can train together again soon.” She withdrew her hand. 

 

Phasma’s reaction was delayed by her shock, but she finally said, “I hope that too. The honor’s been all mine.” She gestured up the corridor. “I’d better not keep the Colonel waiting.”

 

“No,” Nova said. “Best to get it done with. See you around, Lieutenant.” 

 

Phasma replayed the strange conversation in her head on her way to Colonel Vengal’s quarters, but as she got closer, she put it out of her mind in favor of going over the points she wanted to make to her commanding officer. She hoped Nova really was alright, but she had other things she needed to think about. 

 

Colonel Vengal opened his door to her and ushered her inside almost immediately after she buzzed for entry. He was smiling brightly, and wasn’t wearing the jacket of his uniform. He gestured her toward the center of the front room. Like all higher officers, Colonel Vengal’s had a suite of rooms. The front room had a pair of comfortable-looking chairs and, luxury of luxuries, a holoprojector. Phasma noticed that the door into the Colonel’s bedroom was open, and the sight of the bed, with its rumpled-up covers, made her inexplicably uncomfortable. 

 

Colonel Vengal threw himself back into one of the chairs, sprawling with his hands behind his head. 

 

“So, Lieutenant… what was it again?”

 

“Lieutenant Phasma, sir,” she responded, keeping her posture perfect. 

 

He grinned. “That’s what it was. So, Lieutenant Phasma, how are you finding your promotion?”

 

“It is a great honor, sir. Regarding the preparedness of the FN troops, I wanted to…”

 

He cut her off with a huff of breath and a wave of one hand, sitting forward in his chair. “I trust you to handle those details, Lieutenant. I am more interested in discussing your feelings about your new position in the First Order. You say it’s an honor, well, of course it certainly is that. But I wonder if you understand just how much is going to be expected of you?”

 

Without her meaning to, she found herself thinking, _It’s like giving a commission to one of your attack dogs_. “Of course, sir. I am happy to accept the new responsibilities, and I will do everything within my power to make sure my service meets expectations.”

 

Colonel Vengal regarded her for a long moment. She felt as if Captain Irus had covered all this ground already, and she wasn’t sure what he was hoping to accomplish with this meeting. 

 

Only then did the strangeness of meeting in his quarters start to dawn on her.

 

“You know, a promotion is not just for you. It isn’t a gift. It’s all about what you can do for the First Order, and for your superior officers.”

 

_And for my troopers_ , she thought but didn’t say. “Yes, sir,” she said. 

 

“I am, for obvious reasons, particularly interested to see what benefits your promotion will provide to your commanding officer,” Vengal said, then stood from his chair and walked with deliberate slowness to the open doorway to the bedroom, leaning against the wall. He raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you have any thoughts to share on the subject?”

 

It took a moment for it to click. When she realized what he was asking, she felt as if a great weight had suddenly fallen onto her shoulders, threatening to bend her spine. Invisible pressure on her ribs made drawing breath difficult. Her mind raced, trying to figure out where she stood. 

 

He had mentioned her promotion to Lieutenant so many times. And he was the final authority on whether she would get to keep it. Of course: there were conditions. He had brought her here, to this horrible room, to let her know that. 

 

But, like a black hole opening up in the path of a ship, her mind turned a corner and found itself confronted with the knowledge that it wasn’t just her rank that was at stake. She could be stripped of that at nothing more than a word from this man. But how easy would it be for a Stormtrooper that had displeased her commanding officer to be assigned to the most dangerous missions? Anything could happen planetside, far away from the safety of a trooper barracks.

 

Nova, in the hallway, had touched her hand. In sympathy, in understanding. Nova’s words came back to her. _Good luck, not that you need it. You’re very good at what you do. Best to get it done with._

 

Her troopers deserved a strong and competent officer. If not her, who? Someone like Colonel Vengal? 

 

And she deserved to be an officer. No matter what this man in front of her thought. She deserved it, and she was willing to fight for it. No matter what form that fight had to take.

 

She cleared her throat. “Yes, sir,” she told him, looking away from the way his smile widened. 

 

***

 

Later, back in her room, she realized that she still felt the weight pushing down on her, stifling her. As she thought about it, she became aware that the weight was disappointment. 

 

***

 

When her datapad beeped an alarm at her the next morning, she blinked to find that she had been awake, or something like it, all night, staring at the wall. She stood up and dressed in her black underclothes, with her pristine white armor. She’d been so proud of this armor. She had always been, since she’d turned sixteen and been activated for combat for the first time. 

 

She met the contingent of FN troopers that was accompanying her in the troop transport bay. For the most part, their armor was as impeccable as hers; she idly noticed a few scuffs and smudges here and there. They stood at perfect attention, in their rows and squares. 

 

She was proud of them. It welled up in her throat, fighting back the weight across her shoulders. She was proud of them, and she was still proud of her armor. 

 

She had been given an insignia bar for the left side of her breastplate, but apart from that, she was dressed just like them. But she wasn’t like them, not anymore. She was their commanding officer, their Lieutenant, and that meant that she had to make more sacrifices than they did. She had to do more, so that they could be protected, so that they could have a strong and competent officer like they deserved. 

 

She felt a little sick, and her eyes were grainy, but she had to be more than that. She would be more than that. She was strong enough, and no one could change that about her. 

 

She turned around sharply, standing at the head of her FNs, her troopers, pride and disappointment warring in her, and waited for the troop transport to open its loading doors and take her somewhere else.


	5. Hux, 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's been reading! This chapter contains original character deaths.

**_Hux, 26_ **

 

The engagement took one hour and twelve minutes from first shots fired to last enemy destroyed. 

 

The moon was called Ekko-7 and had once been an Imperial outpost accompanied by a particularly productive silica mine. The Republic had moved in after the Empire had been driven into retreat, but with their resources stretched thin, the Republic had contracted their sphere of influence and had not even left a skeleton force to hold the moon. _Idiots_ , Hux thought idly as they sped toward it in hyperspace. 

 

The First Order had been slowly but surely creeping into the edges of the galaxy that the Republic was stretched too thin to protect. They exploited the cracks and weaknesses for anything they could provide, whether it was recruits to fill his father’s Stormtrooper program or material resources like the mine on Ekko-7. Hux had secured several strategic targets over the past three years, and although it hadn’t completely silenced the whispers saying that his rapid climb up the ranks was because of nepotism, it had earned him a measure of respect.

 

Securing the mine and outpost on Ekko-7 would be a major achievement. However, as soon as they exited hyperspace, they were confronted with the fact that someone had beaten them there. 

 

The Resistance may not have had many ships, but they clearly understood which targets were important as well as the First Order did. Hux had been sent with three lumbering troop transports and a small contingent of fifteen quicker-moving fighters. The Resistance had met them with… his eyes moved and finished his count just as the radar operator announced, “Fifty-five fighters, sir.” The Resistance ships could easily deal with the fighters that the First Order had sent and have relatively free reign to run circles around the troop transports. 

 

Hux was in motion toward the comms engineer before he’d even worked out what his strategy was. He’d figured it out by the time he’d made the ten-step journey. 

 

“Comms,” he said, “alert the captains of the troop transports to begin turning around at one-quarter speed. Deploy-“

 

He cut himself off. He had memorized the officer lists for each of the ships under his command, and as he ran through the list of fighter pilots his mind momentarily clicked over into an entirely different set of mission parameters. He clicked himself back into the mission at hand and cleared his throat. 

 

“Deploy fighters A1—5 to accompany the transports in a guard ring formation. Instruct them to turn at one-quarter speed, as well. Deploy fighters B1—5 and C1—5 in a triangular guard formation between the transports and the Resistance fighters, with C1 at the point, then B1 and C2, then B2, B3, and C3, then B4, B5, C4, and C5. Display the formation before transmitting.”

 

Hux looked over the comms engineer’s shoulder at the image of the formation, then nodded sharply. “Transmit.”

 

Hux had spent quite a bit of his free time studying the tactics of the Resistance, reading the after-action reports of every battle with them and trying to get into their heads. The conclusion he had drawn was that they were excellent guerrilla fighters, and very good at picking their battles to conserve their limited resources. 

 

Where they were weak was in the kind of military discipline that had to be constantly and consistently drilled into soldiers in a setting like the First Order. The Resistance wasn’t a regular fighting force; they were officially disavowed by the Republic and drew their ranks from the galaxy’s hopeless idealists. As he understood them, idealists were impatient and cared too much about the action of the moment to think about the long-term consequences. He could exploit that.

 

He could also exploit the fact that formal engagements with the Resistance had, up to that point, been few and far between. This meant that the First Order still had a lot of blanks to fill in about the Resistance’s actual strength in terms of ships and men, but it also meant that the Resistance didn’t have a lot of information about the First Order’s capabilities.

 

So if the captains of the Resistance squadrons saw the troop transports, the most tempting targets, turning laboriously to flee, with only ten fighters standing between them and the transports’ destruction… 

 

There! The Resistance fighters were lunging forward toward the First Order’s triangle guard formation. Though they had thought to arrange themselves loosely into a wedge, the excitement of the moment was clearly getting the better of the Resistance pilots. Moreover, their ships were gathered from any quarter they could scrounge them up, and were mismatched in their speed and maneuverability. Their squadrons’ formations were starting to break down, and what ended up stretching out toward the First Order ships was a ragged line filled with gaps. 

 

There was guaranteed to be losses among the B and C squadrons of the First Order. In particular, the position at the point of the triangle, held by C1, was essentially a sacrificial lamb. But losses were to be expected in any battle, and the most important thing, at the end of the day, was the balance of loss versus gain. Hux assured himself that he would have chosen the same strategy even if he hadn’t had… other motivations. 

 

Hux leaned down to the comms engineer. “Comms, open a channel for me to speak to C1 on a private line,” he said, taking an earpiece from the comms desk and fitting it over his ear. 

 

The line crackled. “C1, standing by,” the voice on the other end said. Hux felt a spike of cold through his body at the sound. He ignored it.

 

“Captain Nol,” he said, calmly and without inflection. “This is Colonel Armitage Hux. You are to hold position until the Resistance engages, is that understood? Do not break formation.”

 

There was a moment of quiet on the other end of the line, then, “Understood, Colonel.”

 

Yes, he had been understood. “As you were, Captain,” Hux said, pulling the earpiece off and returning to his previous position. 

 

He stood in the center of the bridge, his teeth clenched and his arms behind his back. As the commanding officer on board, he had a chair, of course, but he felt it was better to be seen standing, wary and alert. Plus, although he’d never admit it out loud, his nerves during any battle made it completely impossible to stay sitting. 

 

He watched the Resistance fighters inch closer, his heart thudding against his ribs. It was a matter of minutes, although it felt like much longer. As soon as the fastest Resistance fighters engaged the triangle, as soon as the first bright flashes of weapons lit, Hux turned back to the comms engineer and said, “Order the troop transports and all A squadron fighters to turn back around, top speed. Tell the captains and pilots to fire at will on the Resistance fighters, targets at their discretion. Transmit now.” He tried to sound as calm as he could, but his voice was still significantly louder than he had intended it to be.

 

Radar called out casualties as the battle progressed. One of the first destroyed ships to be announced was C1. 

 

***

 

It had taken him five years to add another number to his list. That was alright; he could be patient, and the right opportunity was key.

 

That opportunity had come with a mission to oversee the repair an asteroid-bound gun emplacement. The asteroid was awkward for ships to approach, due to a magnetic field that interfered with guidance systems, which was part of the reason it had been chosen for the emplacement in the first place. Because of this, they had to approach in individual exo-suits. 

 

The mission took five days of spacewalks. The last day was a simple final sweep to ensure all the repairs had been done properly, so it required only Hux’s own presence, as the very junior Lieutenant in charge, and that of the senior technician. 

 

The senior mechanic had previously been a Command Track student who had had a nervous breakdown after the untimely death of an Academy friend and been reassigned to the technical track. His name was Gatra Arayin. 

 

Hux had given him no indication, during the past four days, that he even remembered him. Arayin was nervous that final day, but there was nothing he could do about it without disobeying a direct order.

 

As they had approached the asteroid, Arayin had opened a private channel between their suits. 

 

“Lieutenant Hux, sir,” he had said, nervously. “I just wanted to say, sir, that, for what happened, before, you know, back at the Academy… I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. It was wrong, it shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry.”

 

Hux had stayed silent for a moment, to let him squirm, then said, “Please focus on the task at hand, Technician.”

 

Arayin hadn’t been sorry then. He may have been sorry ten minutes later, when his exo-suit malfunctioned and, instead of scrubbing carbon dioxide and pumping in oxygen, it did exactly the reverse. Then again, he may not even have known something was wrong. Hux only knew there was something dangerous about his lethargy because he had known it was coming. 

 

He’d woken up in the medbay two hours later. The ship’s sensors had registered the change in their vital signs immediately and drawn them back in with the tethers attached to their suits. It had been too late for Technician Arayin, but Lieutenant Hux had been salvageable; the malfunction in his suit had been slower. He took in this information from the nurse who attended him, keeping a serious expression on his face. He knew it already, of course. It was just what he’d hoped would happen when he’d sabotaged the suits the previous evening, under the guise of checking the equipment. 

 

The ship’s quartermaster issued an apology to Hux for the faulty equipment and received a negative note in his service file, but Hux considered that necessary collateral damage. After the doctor left, he had looked at the ceiling and allowed himself a quick whisper of, “Two.”

 

Seven years after that, on the bridge of a ship he commanded, looking out at Ekko-7, he gave himself a second of time to think, _Three_ , before turning his attention back to mopping up the last of the disarrayed Resistance ships. 

 

***

 

After the battle was done, Hux’s little fleet moved into orbit around Ekko-7. He had to draw up his after-action report and send it off, but before he did that he wanted to meet the Lieutenant in charge of the division of Stormtroopers that had just been moved under his command. 

 

He had only been a Captain when the decision had been made to promote Stormtrooper officers, so no one would have cared about his opinion anyway, but he had heard the news with satisfaction. The Stormtrooper program was his father’s great legacy, and had been crafted with all his father’s care and attention. Such was his father’s faith in the program that Hux himself had been administered some of the childhood training regimen, before being shipped off to the Academy, and he thought his excellent service record could attest to the effectiveness of the techniques. He felt that the First Order could readily trust Stormtrooper officers to serve well.

 

He had also never met a Stormtrooper before. On a more personal level, he was looking forward to getting to know his father’s other creation. 

 

As he made his way toward the Stormtrooper barracks, he reviewed the notes he had been sent by Colonel Vengal and frowned again. After five years under Vengal’s command and evaluation, the Stormtrooper officers had been judged to have proven themselves, and the divisions had been dispersed to other commanding officers. The FN division had been placed under Hux’s command just before the start of the current mission, so he’d had very little time to review his new troops. He was about to send them down to secure the mine and base on Ekko-7, and, although he had no doubt that the troopers could accomplish it, he was disappointed in the lack of detailed information he’d been given about his own soldiers. 

 

He would have liked to have personnel reports on every single trooper in the division. As it was, even the personnel report on the Lieutenant herself was rather thinner than he would have liked. Lieutenant Phasma, no second name… Well, of course no second name, she would have chosen it herself, and she had no need of a family name. 

 

Her service record seemed to be impeccable, although, he thought with frustration, there was little more than a “Mission Accomplished” as far as after-action reports went. How could Colonel Vengal have kept such unsatisfactory records? He wondered if it would be considered too insulting to send the other Colonel a message saying that he must have sent over the wrong files, could he please send the correct, complete ones?

 

He put his datapad away in the pocket of his jacket as he approached the Stormtrooper training room. He could hear shouts and grunts of exertion from inside, and one voice raised above the others, shouting orders. It seemed he’d found the Lieutenant. 

 

He would have been able to pick her out easily, even without the bar of rank on her breastplate. She stood at the front of the hall, helmet off, watching the drills with the sharp-edged gaze of a predator. She cut an imposing figure: straight-backed, broad-shouldered, and, he noticed with surprise, taller than him, by two inches, in his estimation. He didn’t see that very often.

 

She caught his movement by the door and flicked her eyes over to him. She came to full attention and shouted, “Officer on deck!” 

 

In perfect unison, the rest of the Stormtroopers dropped their practice weapons to their sides, faced the front of the room, came to full attention, and shouted, “Sir!”

 

Hux allowed himself to smile slightly, genuinely pleased. Lieutenant Phasma kept excellent order. 

 

He crossed to stand beside her and faced the troopers. “At ease. Please return to your drills.” He turned to the Lieutenant. “Lieutenant Phasma, a word.”

 

She nodded and turned toward him. “Of course, sir. I’ve selected the away team to be deployed with me to Ekko-7. We await your orders.”

 

“I’m glad to hear it, Lieutenant. You will be deploying directly. However, I wanted the chance to meet you in person. I have found to my disappointment that Colonel Vengal was an absolutely appalling record-keeper.”

 

He thought he saw the corner of her mouth twitch in an almost-smile, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. “As you say, sir,” she replied. “Colonel Vengal requested that my reporting to him be… concise. That can be changed with little difficulty.”

 

“Good. Conciseness is not something I value in reports directed to me. Not that I don’t trust your judgment when it comes to evaluating your Stormtroopers, but I would like to have more information on each of the troopers in the FN division, including their performance both on missions and in training. I regret having to make more work for you, Lieutenant…”

 

“Not at all, sir,” Lieutenant Phasma responded so quickly that she nearly cut him off. “I keep extensive notes on each of my troopers for my own records, and I have far more detailed reports on past missions than those I sent to Colonel Vengal. I can send my own files to you along with my after-action report on the mission to Ekko-7.”

 

Now Hux was very pleased. Why couldn’t all other officers be Stormtroopers? “Excellent, Lieutenant. Please do so. I’ll have them read within 48 hours, at which point I would like to meet with you to discuss our troop management strategy moving forward.”

 

It was difficult to say for sure what changed about her after he said that, possibly a tightening around her eyes, a stiffening of her posture, but something seemed to close off and grow colder. He found himself completely baffled as to what he had done to cause it. 

 

He was also surprised at how disturbed it made him, to have caused such a reaction without knowing how. He knew that no one particularly liked him as a person, and had used that to his advantage before, needling superior officers that he found unworthy of their position until they started making decisions out of frustration without thinking them through. At that point, it was inevitable that they’d make a mistake, and that he’d have a good chance of moving up to take their place. So being liked on a personal level was clearly overrated. 

 

But he desperately wanted to be able to understand and control the effect he was having on other people. If he couldn’t do that, he would always be vulnerable. That completely unwelcome _thing_ at the back of his consciousness stirred, trying to coax him to reach out to her with his mind, take the information from her somehow. He crushed it down again. Over the twelve years he’d had to share space with whatever it was, it had gotten weaker and weaker the more he beat it back. Eventually, he hoped, he’d destroy it altogether. 

 

Phasma’s voice, when she spoke again, gave no hint of what she was feeling. “Of course, sir. Where will we be meeting?” she asked coolly. 

 

Hux frowned. Did she have some kind of preference? Did she expect him to? All the meeting rooms aboard the ship were functionally identical. “I’ll reserve a room and let you know the location and time. As long as we are on board ship together, I’d like to meet weekly.”

 

He thought she might have been surprised by his answer, but the emotion was gone in an instant. “Yes, sir.”

 

He regarded her in silence for a long moment, then took another step toward her and lowered his voice. “Lieutenant, if I may ask a somewhat sensitive question?”

 

A twitch of her eyebrows was all that betrayed her confusion. “Of course, sir,” she replied.

 

“The average time between entry into the First Order as a Lieutenant and promotion to Captain is twenty months. You have been a Lieutenant for five years, despite your string of battlefield successes. Colonel Vengal gave me no indication of why he never put in a promotion request for you; was he more forthcoming with you?”

 

Lieutenant Phasma hesitated before answering, and seemed to choose her words carefully. “It was my understanding, sir, that we… By that I mean the Stormtrooper officers, sir, were intended from the beginning to remain as Lieutenants, under the command of officers who were not… who had been trained at the Academy.”

 

Hux grit his teeth. That was the most absolutely preposterous fence-sitting he had ever heard of. The First Order should either keep the Stormtroopers as a rank-less fighting force or give their officers the opportunity to advance as their talents warranted, not take this useless middle path that served no one. 

 

“That’s ridiculous,” Hux said curtly, pulling his datapad out of his coat pocket and adding the promotion request to his stack of paperwork to be completed once he was off duty. “Your service record speaks for itself. I’ll have the request submitted by the time you get back from Ekko-7.”

 

He slipped the datapad back into his pocket and looked up at her. If she had looked surprised this time, he hadn’t been watching closely enough to see it. She inclined her head toward him and said, “Thank you, sir.”

 

He remembered his father telling him, _There’s nothing in this galaxy that you should say “thank you” for. It’s always either something you deserve and would take by force if it wasn’t given, or something being given to try to control you_. He could tell her that she deserved the promotion, that thanks weren’t necessary, but she probably already knew that. She had probably spent the last five years knowing that she deserved to be higher in the ranks than she was. 

 

“That will be all, Lieutenant,” he said instead, and turned and left the training room. 

 

***

 

As it turned out, he had to get the bare minimum of sleep every night in order to keep his word to her that he’d get her reports read in 48 hours. They were extensive. Every one of the strengths and weaknesses of the troopers under her were listed and evaluated and used as the justification for her assignment of personnel to missions. Each mission report had frank commentary of what improvements would need to be made to unit functioning and suggestions for new training techniques. 

 

Lieutenant Phasma was obviously extremely competent and was neither overly pessimistic nor self-deluding. Hux had the thought, not for the last time as it turned out, that she had been completely wasted on Colonel Vengal.


	6. Phasma, 24

**_Phasma, 24_ **

 

Throughout the six months that she’d known her new commanding officer, she had been almost completely bemused by him.

 

In the first place, he was very, very young. He couldn’t have been much older than she was. Most officers that age she’d seen were Lieutenants or Captains, not Colonels. Colonel Vengal had been a couple of decades older. She hadn’t known very much about Colonel Hux before meeting him that first time; as a Stormtrooper, she didn’t have access to anything but rumor to inform her about her commanding officers. But his youth was one thing that rumor stressed; she’d heard a wide variety of explanations, from pure nepotism to his ruthless elimination of anyone who outranked him. She had dismissed rumor and decided to trust her own observations, but she was still trying to figure him out.

 

Second, he didn’t look very much like a soldier. He was tall, but not the way she was tall. He seemed almost elongated, like a vine that had found a good strong tree trunk to grow alongside. When he gestured with his hands, which was often and expansively, she was always half-worried that he would hit one or two of his long, slender fingers against a wall and snap them. He carried himself like a soldier, stiff and straight, but he seemed to have trouble controlling his face; every so often something she said would surprise him, and he’d frown exaggeratedly, one eyebrow raised, before catching himself and going blank again. 

 

And third, he paid attention to _everything_. At their first meeting, she’d half expected some mealy-mouthed “Good work, keep it up” non-discussion, like she would have gotten from Colonel Vengal. Instead, he’d clearly read every file she’d sent him and had even asked questions. Every meeting since had been the same. He seemed to want to know everything she could tell him about the Stormtrooper program, about the ways they functioned together and performed their missions. She supposed it made sense for him to take an interest in his own father’s great project, but his insatiable curiosity and his memory of the details of everything they talked about took her by surprise. 

 

Strangest of all was the fact that he’d apparently been serious about that promotion. He occasionally gave her updates, sounding exasperated, “It’s been passed through such-and-such committee, but the such-and-such board is still raising objections due to Article Whatever, and Lieutenant General So-and-so has asked for a subcommittee report, of all idiotic things…” It might as well have been gibberish to her, she didn’t know who any of these people or committees were, but it made the whole thing, the idea of “Captain Phasma,” seem more real to her.

 

She had asked him, politely, of course, why he was so determined that she should be promoted. He had responded, as if he was reciting an aphorism that he’d had to memorize at some point, “Any military that doesn’t properly manage and utilize its resources is doomed to failure. You are an exceptional resource, Lieutenant.”

 

She knew that she deserved to be a Captain, but she chided herself every time she thought it. Her years as an officer had taught her the lesson that she should always look down, not up. There was nothing she could do to change the officers above her, but her troopers were her entire responsibility. She’d do whatever was in her power to make sure they could survive any terrible decision made by her own commanding officers. 

 

She was aware that she pushed her troopers far harder in training than Captain Irus ever did, and she was aware that some of them hated her for it. For some of the newer troopers, only recently old enough to be activated for combat, she was the only immediate commander they had ever known, a thought that was both exciting and terrifying to her. These newer troopers viewed her as an almost mythic figure of malice and punishment. That wasn’t what she’d thought to become when she had first been promoted, but she could live with it. Her troopers would always be at the mercy of the officers above them. No matter what Colonel Hux claimed he intended, she would have no way to influence him or change his mind. She would just have to make the best of the situation. 

 

By the same token, she couldn’t help but think that _a promotion is not a gift_. She wasn’t sure what he would want from her in return. He had not asked for anything, and she couldn’t imagine that he would be slower to act than Colonel Vengal. But she couldn’t let her guard down or become complacent around him. He wasn’t a Stormtrooper, after all. He was her commanding officer, and his orders could not be changed; they could only be survived.

 

***

 

Six months and thirteen days after the mission to Ekko-7, Lieutenant Phasma woke up, rose from her bed to use the refresher, and tried to remember the dream she had been having. She thought perhaps that it had had something to do with her home planet. She hadn’t dreamed about it, or even thought about it, in a very long time. 

 

Idly, she thought of her parents, and stopped dead in her tracks. She couldn’t remember their faces. She’d long since lost any of the finer details of their appearances, but she’d managed to hold onto an impression, like a child’s drawing. Now even that was gone. She struggled to place them in some kind of context, to imagine them in their house, in the fields beyond, but she couldn’t sketch out either location. It was all gone. 

 

How long had it been since the last time she had tried to picture her parents? It was months at least. Maybe even a full year. Sometime during that period, while she’d had her attention focused elsewhere, those memories had bled out of her consciousness, gone down deep where she couldn’t retrieve them, and she’d just let it happen. She’d let her own parents slip through her fingers, and hadn’t even noticed exactly when it had occurred.  

 

How could she have done this? She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, struggling to keep hold of a flood of thoughts that she would ordinarily silence immediately. She didn’t even know if her parents were still alive. They could be dead and her siblings with them. She could be the only one left who could remember them, and she’d just let them go without a fight. Maybe they were all still alive somewhere, together, and they had forgotten her as completely as she had forgotten them. 

 

She had clenched her hands into fists and was digging her short nails into the flesh of her palms. She forced herself to stop and stand upright, looking into the mirror. She was pale but otherwise looked the same as she always did. Her face was free of expression. That was the goal: she could force the rest of herself to be as still as her face. She had the strength of will to do that. 

 

She took several deep breaths, staring at her eyes in the mirror and refusing to think of anything else. She didn’t have time for upheaval. She had work to do. 

 

Oh, fuck. She did have work to do that day. She was supposed to be doing the first full training run-through of a new unit attack formation. She had developed it based on her experiences on her last planetside mission and pitched it to Colonel Hux as a possible training improvement; when he’d approved it, she’d jumped to implement it as quickly as possible before he could change his mind. Colonel Hux would be observing and evaluating the demonstration in person, damn him. She really, really did not have time to be anything less than perfectly calm. 

 

She forced her breathing to even out, forced herself to hold her stare in the mirror. _You’re good at what you do_. She hadn’t seen Lieutenant Nova in years, but she still sometimes used her words as motivation. _You’re good at what you do. You don’t have off days. You are strong enough and competent enough to get through this._

 

She usually carried her helmet with her when she was just walking around the Stormtrooper barracks, but she put it on as she headed to the largest training theater, just for that extra layer of protection. She thought, when she’d walked out of the refresher, that she’d won the struggle to keep herself poised, but by the way other troopers quickly got out of her path, she guessed that she was walking too fast or that something in the set of her shoulders and back gave her away. She forced herself to slow down, distracted herself by thinking hard about her pace and posture. 

 

Her mind seemed like a shuttle caught in a tailspin. She didn’t let herself think about her parents, about what she’d allowed herself to lose, but that made her think instead about the possibility that this training exercise could go very badly, and what she would allow herself to lose if that happened. That train of thought would lead her back to the cause of her mood, and then she was trying to turn her thoughts away from her parents again. Everything she tried to fix the problem just seemed to increase the stress she was under. 

 

Colonel Hux was already there when she arrived. In fact, she noticed with dismay, she was the last one there. The troopers she’d hand-picked for the exercise were waiting below, in the pit of the training theater. She must have taken longer than she’d thought to get a hold of herself. 

 

“Lieutenant Phasma,” Colonel Hux said with a nod. “Let’s begin.”

 

She saluted him wordlessly and took the stairs down to the pit at a measured pace. She could do this. She could hold this damned formation together. 

 

It was an absolute fucking disaster, of course. She gave it everything she had, but she was already using what felt like half her mind to force herself to focus on the task at hand, which didn’t leave enough for the damned task at hand. 

 

She was a split second behind where she needed to be with every order that she gave. She’d practiced this, damn it, over and over again. She’d designed the entire formation. And when it counted, she wasn’t able to hold it together. The drill was meant to last exactly one hour and fifteen minutes. Her troopers limped to the end of the formation drill nearly two hours later, and it was obvious that it hadn’t been done right. She had let them down. She ignored the confused shifting of her troopers behind her. This wasn’t like her. 

 

Colonel Hux had seen everything. She hoped he’d be able to tell that it had been her that had fucked up, not her troopers, but she suspected he was smart enough to do so. She wouldn’t think about what she’d just lost for herself. She deserved to be a Captain. She would never be one now. 

 

She made her way up the stairs to the observation deck over the pit. She marched quickly and didn’t drag her feet. When she was standing in front of him, Colonel Hux tilted his head and looked at her for a long moment before turning his back on the troopers in the pit. He leaned forward conspiratorially when he spoke to her, keeping his voice low. 

 

“Lieutenant,” he said. “Am I correct in assuming that that was an unsuccessful implementation of the training drill?”

 

She hated him for a second, but hating commanding officers never did any good. She nodded sharply. “Yes, sir. I was unable to hold the formation together. I apologize for wasting your time.”

 

For once, she couldn’t read his facial expression. He kept clenching and unclenching his jaw, and the fingers of his left hand kept twitching and tapping against his leg, as if he was struggling with some emotion or internal debate. He was possibly just very angry. He was a busy man, and she had wasted quite a bit of his time. She wondered if the punishment would be a simple dressing down in front of her troopers, or whether it would be something more substantial. 

 

Finally, he said, “Lieutenant Phasma, this is not what I have come to expect from you.” She nodded again, her back so stiff it almost hurt. It wasn’t what she expected from herself, either. “As this performance is so out of the ordinary,” Colonel Hux went on, “I am forced to conclude that you are ill or in some other way indisposed.”

 

She blinked in surprise. “Sir…” she began, but didn’t know how to finish the statement. She’d never heard an officer even acknowledge that Stormtroopers could be ill before. They received a battery of inoculations every year, and the higher officers seemed to think that rendered them invulnerable.

 

“Please report to the medbay if necessary, Lieutenant. I would like to schedule an additional run-through of this drill for tomorrow at the same time. Will that be enough recovery time?”

 

She nodded again. “Of course, sir.”

 

“Thank you, Lieutenant. I look forward to a successful demonstration tomorrow.” Colonel Hux turned on his heel and walked out. 

 

Phasma went back down to the pit to inform her troopers about the new demonstration, then returned to her quarters. She decided that, in lieu of the medbay, she would get some work done and then spend the rest of her day adding to her little encyclopedia of plants. It had grown quite a bit with the information she picked up on planetside missions, not to mention her bit of access to the First Order’s digital library. It would calm her down, get her to the point that she could put aside her worries about her parents, get her ready to do things right the next day. 

 

She felt, strangely… warm. There was warmth under her ribs, working its way into the colder parts of her mind. She wasn’t sure what to think about it. 

 

The next day, the drill went exactly as it was supposed to. Colonel Hux had rearranged his meetings for the day, so he couldn’t stay to discuss it with her afterward, but he told her he had some “brief notes” to send to her, which consisted of 6,000 words written in complete sentences. Some of the suggestions were helpful, but some she thought wouldn’t work for one reason or another, and she spent a somewhat sleepless night wondering how to convince him of that without offending him or pissing him off. 

 

As it turned out, at their next meeting, he asked for her honest opinion, so she gave it. He listened carefully to her arguments, agreed, and retracted the suggestions she had had an issue with. He told her to let him know if she had any other ideas for new designs for training drills. 

 

She had felt it so rarely since being promoted, especially for anyone who wasn’t a Stormtrooper, that it took her a week to identify the warm feeling as respect.


	7. Hux, 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains original character death. Also, the rank order I'm using is taken from the (Wikipedia page about the) US army and goes: Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Lieutenant Colonel, Colonel, Brigadier General, Major General, Lieutenant General, General.

**_Hux, 27_ **

 

Hux had argued that this mission would be better served by using only Stormtroopers on the ground, but Lieutenant General Urien had demanded that there be a force of enlisted soldiers, led by an Academy-trained officer, on site as well. Hux found this completely ridiculous; he didn’t think the First Order had a fighting force better than the FN Stormtroopers, and he wouldn’t trust the Academy-trained officers he’d met to do half of what he could count on Captain Phasma to do. Besides, Lieutenant General Urien was staying on the ship, and Hux would be the ranking officer planetside.

 

But Urien was a Lieutenant General, and Hux was a Brigadier General, so here he was, looking over the list of soldiers that Urien had assigned. He didn’t and wouldn’t know any of the enlisted, so he scrolled past them and read the names of the officers, double-checking their combat records, as he paced in circles around his quarters and sipped a cup of coffee. 

 

One name made him stop dead in his tracks. The ranking officer of the unit, at least until she was placed under Hux’s command, was listed as _Maj. Sedge, Konender_. He very slowly and carefully walked over to his desk and put the half-full cup down so that he wouldn’t drop it on the carpet. Then he stood very still and reviewed Lieutenant General Urien’s notes on the assignment of this unit to the mission. 

 

Major Sedge was one of Urien’s proteges, and he had offered her and her unit the mission before even considering anyone else. Hux scowled. Of course he had. The First Order had received intelligence that, due to an internal power struggle in the Republic, an extremely productive source of khyber crystals near the edge of Republican space had been left with a severely limited defensive force. 

 

The mission to secure the planet in question was both time-sensitive and very important, which was why they had assigned a Brigadier General to oversee it onsite. Putting Major Sedge on the ground would give her the opportunity to cover herself in glory and could possibly make her career. No wonder Urien had turned down his request to use only Stormtroopers, if he was hoping to hand an impressive victory to one of his followers.

 

Of course, Hux was determined that the mission would be listed as his own success. He was hoping that, in particular, his obtaining the crystals would give him some leeway in requesting their allocation to a weapons development project that he was in the process of setting up. He really did not want to share credit for the victory with anyone, let alone with… He steered himself away from the thought. 

 

It had only been a year since he had orchestrated the death of Captain Nol. It had been over a decade since he had been fourteen and helpless, and he had been content to wait and bide his time in the other cases, looking for the perfect opportunity. Part of him was thrilled by the sudden seeming windfall of being planetside with his final target, with Captain Phasma and a sizable unit of FN troopers at his back.

 

Another part of him recognized it as the potential trap that it was. It wasn’t as if he could just give in to the temptation to have the Stormtroopers execute Major Sedge as soon as they were out of range of the ship; Sedge would be dead, but so would he as soon as he got back. 

 

But if he could spin this into an opportunity… Who knew when he would be this close to Sedge again?

 

He fired off a quick message to Lieutenant General Urien saying that he had reviewed the other officer’s choice and approved it. It wasn’t as if he could have said no, but it was good to maintain the pretense of having some measure of control, even if it was false. It was the sort of thing that might affect people’s unconscious impressions of him. As his father had told him, _What a person knows they are thinking about you is only a small part of the field of battle._

 

He considered setting up a meeting with Captain Phasma to go over the mission objectives and their strategy for working with the enlisted troops, but thought better of it. They had had three meetings of that sort already, and there was nothing to be gained from another except wasting the Captain’s time and giving Hux and illusory feeling of security. 

 

He repeated to himself that the mission to secure the resources was the first priority. The other mission might have to wait. This wasn’t an opportunity yet, and if an opportunity didn’t present itself, he was fully capable of being patient and letting the moment go. Better to wait another decade than to be brought up before a tribunal for murdering a junior officer. 

 

Several hours later, he realized he was still going over the mission plans, over and over, and forced himself to bring up the technical plans he’d begun designing for his weapons project. They were still highly speculative, of course, but he thought he had the seeds of something truly special. Something game-changing. 

 

It was good to remind himself that there was more at stake than a personal mission he’d assigned himself when he’d still been a teenager. And that he would have a legacy far bigger than the fate of Konender Sedge. 

 

***

 

He had convinced himself that he was completely prepared for the mission when he had walked out of his quarters that morning. He didn’t even make it out of the damned hangar bay before he was taken off guard. 

 

For fuck’s sake, he knew damned well what she looked like. The sight of her shouldn’t have made a jolt of animal panic run through him the way it did. He was stupidly, absurdly grateful for Captain Phasma standing at his back, blaster at her hip and standing at the head of forty hand-picked FNs. 

 

“Major Sedge,” he said, voice steady. 

 

She looked every inch the officer on their way up the ranks, uniform on perfectly straight, head held high even as she saluted him. He had to remind himself that there was absolutely no reason he should be intimidated by her, that he outranked her several times over. What the hell was wrong with him?

 

She didn’t say anything as she stood to attention, and there was not even a flicker of recognition in her eyes. Had she completely forgotten who he was? That was a good thing, really. It would make it easier to set up the kind of opportunity he needed. There was no reason whatsoever for that to make him angry. 

 

The shuttle ride to the planet’s surface was tense enough to make Hux’s skin crawl, though what percentage of that was his own emotion and what percentage was his reaction to the completely unacceptable levels of discipline from the enlisted troops was anyone’s guess. The enlisted soldiers shifted in their seats, glanced around each other, held each other’s eyes. It was completely obvious that they were nervous about the mission, even afraid. That kind of weakness would feed off itself and build from person to person. 

 

Hux irritatedly made a note to bring that up with the other generals. He knew there were some who trusted the motivations of volunteer enlisted forces over those of Stormtroopers, but Hux thought the truth of the matter was clear in the perfect, ready stillness of Captain Phasma and her FNs. He glanced at them approvingly. He did not glance at Major Sedge, and tried to keep his eyes straight ahead, face expressionless and unconcerned, for the majority of the descent.

 

Once on the surface, he worked quickly to set up the base of command in the clearing where they’d landed the shuttle, shielded by trees all around. He wouldn’t be present at the actual battle itself, of course, but each of the soldiers, Stormtrooper and enlisted, was equipped with a tracker set into the armor, so that he would be able to monitor their positions in real time and change orders as needed. He set up the portable terminal and called Captain Phasma and Major Sedge over. 

 

“Our most recent intelligence survey has indicated no need to alter the plan as previously outlined,” he told them. “Major Sedge, please attack the Republican forces in a W formation to surround and divide their troops. Captain Phasma, please fan the FN troopers out in the rear of the formation to support Major Sedge’s force and prevent breakthroughs in their line. Is that clear?”

 

They both saluted and went to the head of their forces. Hux hated this plan. There was absolutely no reason that the Stormtroopers should be in the rear of the formation when they were far more capable of performing the initial attack. But, of course, Lieutenant General Urien had insisted, for the sake of his pet Major.

 

Hux watched the color-coded dots on his terminal screen arrange themselves into position. He had to grudgingly admit that the enlisted soldiers got themselves in order almost as quickly as the Stormtroopers. Almost. He watched the two lines move forward, steadily. 

 

Then he frowned. Captain Phasma was out of position. She was moving further out of position. She had peeled away from the formation and was moving backward, away from where the front line was going to be. This was so completely unlike her that for a moment he entertained the impossible thought that he had somehow mistaken who was who on his screen.

 

He reached for the communicator to ask her what the hell she was doing, but paused when he heard the crack of a twig snapping behind him. That was all the warning he got before a bolt of lightning struck him. Every muscle in his body seized up and all the air was punched out of his lungs. He registered that the world was tilting on its axis, then the ground somehow swept up to hit him along the entire length of his body. 

 

He struggled to get his muscles to cooperate in reaching for his blaster. He hadn’t even managed to touch it before he saw something black and shiny and boot-shaped coming at him in his peripheral vision and a small explosion went off behind his left eye socket. 

 

When his vision cleared, he realized he was on his back, looking up at Konender Sedge, who was grinning and holding a voltage baton in one hand and Hux’s own blaster in the other. Inanely, he thought, _She shouldn’t have that baton, they’re supposed to only be issued to Stormtroopers_. 

 

“So,” Sedge said, dragging out the word. “Here we are again. It hasn’t gotten any harder to sneak up on you.”

 

He had a knife in his boot. If he could get to it, if he could get inside her guard so she couldn’t hit him with the baton… His hands were still twitching from the aftershocks of the electricity, and he couldn’t seem to get enough air. Thoughts of strategy kept being pushed out by thoughts of her hands holding his wrists, bruisingly tight. 

 

Sedge raised the gun and pointed it at him. “I see you moving. Going for a knife, right? Don’t do that. I’d like to kill you _after_ we’ve had a chance to chat, but as long as you end up dead, the timing is secondary.”

 

He stilled. No use doing something rash and pointless. As long as he was still alive, there was still a chance. As long as she was talking…

 

“You seriously thought,” she said, after staring him down for a long moment, to be sure he was doing as she told him, “that after watching you take out the others, watching you take out my _friends_ , one by one, that I’d just sit back and let you weave your little plans without making any of my own?” She laughed harshly. “You’re just as much of an arrogant prick as you were back then. You haven’t changed a bit.”

 

She’d always faded into the background behind Nol, and he’d discounted her. _Stupid, stupid_ , he thought. She was smarter than he’d given her credit for, and now he was going to die. 

 

“How,” he began. He had to stop to steady his voice. She noticed. She quirked one eyebrow at him. Damn it, damn it. “How did you get here without showing up on the terminal?”

 

She grinned again. “Nice trick, huh? Blackmailed a technician to alter the tracker, key it to one of my soldiers’ trackers so it would always give its location as his. When I’m done here, it’ll show that I was in position the whole time, and I’ve made damn sure that all of my soldiers would lie for me. Also blackmailed a quartermaster to get me one of these nice batons. Quieter than a blaster. It’s amazing what you can find out, what you can accomplish, when you’re not playing out a childish revenge fantasy for something that happened years ago and that nobody gives a shit about but you.” Her voice grew more heated as she talked, until she ended on a snarl. 

 

Her fingers tightened on the blaster and she grit her teeth. Hux said nothing, waiting for her to continue. 

 

“You know,” she finally said, “Gatra pretty much lost his mind after what you did to Ten? He was never the same, really, just waiting for you to come after him. But you took so long that he’d convinced himself that he was safe. I knew it wasn’t an accident, either time. I knew. I tried to convince Sorken to find any pretext whatsoever to get assigned away from you, anything at all, and when that didn’t work I tried to get him reassigned myself. Called in every favor I’d stored up. But I was just a Captain then, myself. And then he was gone, too, and I knew I was the only one left. I wasn’t just going to wait for you.”

 

“And yet,” Hux couldn’t stop himself from saying, “you didn’t ask anyone for help. Not even your friend Urien. Why was that?”

 

She bared her teeth at him again. Even here, knowing he wasn’t long for this world, knowing he’d been thoroughly defeated, Hux couldn’t help but take pleasure in the reversal. The mirror image of what Nol had once said to him. 

 

“They were _mine_ ,” she hissed. “They were my friends. I could count on them, trust them, we’d gotten each other through so much, through everything. And you hunted them down like animals. You thought we were monsters, fine, but you, you, look at you! It’s been thirteen years and you never stopped hunting them, never stopped planning detail after detail how you were going to hurt them, never thought about anything else. What the hell does that make you? What kind of man does that make you?”

 

_That is hardly fair_ , Hux thought. _I thought about a lot of other things_. But she didn’t say anything else, and he realized with shock that she was waiting for him to answer. She wanted him to explain himself to her.

 

But what the fuck was he supposed to say to her? Standing here, aggrieved, waiting for him to confirm for her that he was truly the villain here, when all they’d had to do to live was _leave him the hell alone_. 

 

He held her stare and said, “It doesn’t matter how good you were to each other. You were monsters when it mattered.”

 

Her grip tightened again on the gun, turning her knuckles white. She raised it to aim directly between his eyes. “Goodbye, Hux,” she said. 

 

Time slowed. This was the end. Unless… That damned whisper at the edges of his consciousness, stronger now. All he had to do was give in, take hold of it, use it. He could save himself, kill the last of his living nightmares, become stronger, become invulnerable, invincible, unkillable…

 

All he had to do was give in. He would be changed, yes, but wasn’t that better than being dead? He closed his eyes and reached out…

 

The sound of a blaster firing, and time sped back up again. He blinked his eyes open and looked in front of him in shock. Sedge was down, lying curled on the ground, weapons fallen from her grasp beside her, a thin wisp of smoke coming from a ragged, burned hole in her skull. At the edge of the clearing, emerging from the trees, was a Stormtrooper holding a blaster. No, not just a Stormtrooper: there was the bar of rank on her breastplate. Captain Phasma. 

 

She didn’t say anything, just calmly holstered her blaster as Hux struggled to drag himself to his feet. Having almost been unleashed, whatever the _thing_ was in the back of his mind seemed reluctant to be forced back down, and it took him a moment to get a handle on it, to push it away from himself. He hoped it just looked like he was catching his breath. He was almost assassinated, after all, he could take a moment. 

 

His head hurt. So did his arm. He looked down and saw that the voltage baton had punched through his coat and shirt where it had impacted his arm just below his left shoulder, leaving behind a spreading, blistering burn. He looked up at Captain Phasma, who stood completely still, staring him down from behind her helmet. He wished he could see her face.

 

His shock at being suddenly saved from certain death was starting to be eclipsed by a different sort of fear. “Captain,” he said, and stopped to clear his throat after his voice cracked. “Captain,” he tried again, “I appreciate the assistance. Why… How did you come to be here?”

 

When she spoke, her voice gave nothing away. “I happened to observe Major Sedge out of position and moving back toward the base of command. I became suspicious when I didn’t receive updated orders from you to reflect this, and elected to investigate.”

 

“That was fortunate for me,” Hux answered. “Did you…” he trailed off. There wasn’t an unsuspicious way to ask her what she had overheard. Sedge had said enough to damn him. Systematically murdering a group of his peers and subordinates would be plenty to have him brought up before a court-martial and summarily executed. 

 

There was a moment of silence that was probably much shorter than it seemed. Finally, Captain Phasma said, “When I arrived, Major Sedge was talking in a way that made me assume she must have had some kind of break with reality. Complete nonsense. I judged that my commanding officer’s life was in immanent danger and acted accordingly.”

 

Hux swallowed against the wave of relief. “Quick thinking, Captain. Th—“ he almost couldn’t get the words out, “thank you.” _There’s nothing in this galaxy that you should say “thank you” for_ , he thought in his father’s voice. But maybe there was something, after all.

 

Captain Phasma merely inclined her head. 

 

“Shit,” Hux said, suddenly snapping back to his awareness of the situation. “The mission. Please return to your position, Captain, we’ll have to adjust the formation as quickly as possible.”

 

Captain Phasma suddenly stepped close to him, her helmeted face moving to examine his own. He almost stepped back in alarm. 

 

“I believe you may be concussed, sir,” Captain Phasma said. “It might be wise to withdraw.”

 

“Absolutely not,” Hux answered, indignantly. “This mission is too important. Please return to position and have your troopers swap their position in the formation with that of the enlisted soldiers.”

 

“Of course, sir,” she answered, stepping back.

 

As she made to leave, Hux realized that she had made a good point. “Captain,” he called to her. “Your point about my capacity is well taken. If at any point during the operation my orders should seem questionable, I leave it to your discretion to take over command.”

 

She looked at him for a long moment, then saluted sharply and melted back into the trees. His head throbbed and he could barely lift his burned arm, but he made his way back to his terminal. On the way, he stopped beside Sedge’s body and put one of his boots on her hand, pressing down until he heard a bone snap. 

 

“Four,” he said out loud, making no effort to keep his voice quiet.

 

***

 

Stepping off the shuttle in the hangar bay, flushed with the success of the mission, Hux was nonetheless aware that the course of action he was about to pursue could potentially be a very serious mistake. 

 

He thought his father would probably have already turned on Captain Phasma, accused her of having murdered Major Sedge without cause, and had her thrown in the brig, if not executed immediately. It would be safer than sharing a secret with her that could lead to his complete ruin. But all through the shuttle ride from the planet’s surface, he had been toying with another idea. 

 

He really wanted to get this done before Lieutenant General Urien arrived to debrief (interrogate) them about Major Sedge’s death. “Captain Phasma,” he said as soon as their boots hit the hangar bay floor, “a word?” She nodded and he gestured her toward the wall of the small control room housing the master hangar bay computer. 

 

If the location gave her any pause, she didn’t show it. To prevent the possibility of the Resistance or the Republic planting devices to spy on the First Order’s ship deployments, the master computer had been outfitted with a protective neutralizing field that prevented any machines designed for recording or transmitting data. This also meant that a conversation taking place within the field couldn’t be listened in on by anything conveniently placed by someone in the First Order, either. At the same time, the control room was close enough to the action of the bay that it wasn’t inherently suspicious that two officers would move in its direction to have a conversation away from the bustle and noise. 

 

“Captain,” Hux said as soon as he judged they were within the field, then realized he wasn’t entirely sure how to phrase this.

 

Captain Phasma didn’t give him anything to go off of, just stood straight and silent, helmet facing steadily in his direction. 

 

He stood to attention, hands behind his back, hoping it would help him get his thoughts in order. “Your actions on the planet’s surface, and the situation that necessitated them, has made it clear to me that… that even within the First Order, it can’t hurt to have… to have an ally.”

 

Captain Phasma’s head tilted slightly at that. He had no idea what that meant, so he barreled on. “Although we are all ostensibly on the same side, not everyone’s motivations are… unified, so to speak. I think an alliance between the two of us could potentially offer us both a measure of security.”

 

He could have rambled on in that vein, but he didn’t think he could put it any more clearly than that, so he fell into silence as Captain Phasma considered him, motionlessly. 

 

Finally, she said, “I see your point, sir. I agree that an alliance would serve us both well.”

 

His reaction to that, not satisfaction or even relief but genuine happiness, took him by surprise. He took a deep breath and blinked a couple of times to keep it from showing on his face. He gestured toward the door out of the hangar bay. “Very well, Captain. I believe Lieutenant General Urien is waiting to debrief us.”

 

As they fell into step toward the door, Captain Phasma leaned slightly toward him and said in a low voice, “Given the conclusion to our conversation, sir, if I may offer an observation…?”

 

He glanced at her and nodded. “Of course, Captain.”

 

“I was already looking out for Major Sedge’s movements because I observed that there was something suspicious in her first interaction with you.”

 

He was very glad that he’d chosen to ally with her rather than stab her in the back. “Is that so?” he asked. “She hid her intentions very well. I almost thought she hadn’t recognized me.”

 

Captain Phasma nodded. “She hid her intentions perfectly. Your reaction was what I was observing.”

 

Hux frowned. “I was endeavoring to have no visible reaction.”

 

“I was aware that that might have been the case, sir,” Captain Phasma said dryly. 

 

Hux scowled.


	8. Phasma, 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains canonical character death.

**_Phasma, 26_ **

 

They stood together in an observation room attached to the hangar, waiting for General Hux’s shuttle to dock, and Major General Hux was talking about his big weapons project. He had been doing so steadily for the past twenty minutes. He was talking very fast, even by his standards, sweeping his hands back and forth to hide the twitches in his fingers as he described technical details that she couldn’t follow and didn’t particularly care about. 

 

He was extremely passionate about the project, codenamed Starkiller (Phasma frequently had to keep herself from laughing at the theatricality of the name). This was certainly not the first time that Phasma had been subjected to a one-sided discussion of what Major General Hux referred to as “the weapon,” as if it was the only one worth mentioning. But the depth of detail this time, along with the fact that he was practically tripping over his words, was concerning. 

 

He was more nervous than she had ever seen him, even in the middle of a battle, and he was doing a terrible job of hiding it. It was giving her a skin-prickling, uncomfortable feeling that made her want to shift or even pace. She usually wasn’t very bothered by Major General Hux’s complete inability to hide his feelings, given that it was always safer to know what one’s commanding officer was thinking, but just this once she wished that he could have a better poker face. 

 

This would be her first time meeting General Hux, or even being in the same room as him. In fact, this would be her first time meeting a full General. Officers that high up the chain of command didn’t usually interact with officers of her rank. The only reason she and her FNs hadn’t been transferred to the direct command of a lower-ranking officer long ago was Major General Hux’s extremely vocal protests. 

 

So she had no idea what to expect. It worried her, though, that her own commanding officer was reacting this way. She ran through her memories of their recent missions, trying to figure out what could possibly be objectionable or worthy of reprimand in their performance. Since the mission to secure the khyber crystals, which had been accomplished with so few casualties and so little loss of resources that Hux (her Hux, not the other one) had been promoted from Brigadier to Major General, everything they’d done had gotten them commendations. There hadn’t been a single failed mission. 

 

What could General Hux have to complain about? Nothing that she could see. Idly, she thought that perhaps General Hux was a sadistic madman who would leap off his ship, blaster drawn, demanding that the FNs be decimated to keep morale up. If the man’s own son was this beside himself at the thought of the General’s arrival, was she at risk from him?

 

No, that was impossible, she realized. Their alliance was only a year old, but Phasma had no doubt that Major General Hux would have warned her if that was the case.

 

To distract herself from worrisome thoughts, she ran through, in her head, the list of interesting armor materials she had been looking at the night before. Major General Hux had made the offhand suggestion to her, a few weeks earlier, that as the only Stormtrooper Captain, she should have different armor, rather than just a rank bar. 

 

At first she’d disregarded the idea as a foolish waste of resources, but the longer it stayed in her mind, the more she had realized that she didn’t mind the idea of being set apart in some way, instantly recognizable. She’d asked Major General Hux if she could get armor dyed in a slightly different shade, or black instead of white. Instead, he’d suggested that she choose a completely different material and started messaging her ideas for possibilities. (It hadn’t escaped her notice that every single one of his suggestions was stronger and harder to penetrate than the standard Stormtrooper armor.) So, as Hux tried to keep his nerves from overwhelming him by talking, Phasma tried to keep his nerves from infecting her by thinking out the pros and cons of each potential choice. 

 

Finally, a klaxon sounded to indicate an inbound ship. Major General Hux’s mouth shut mid-sentence with an audible click of teeth, and he turned wordlessly to walk out of the observation room and into the hangar bay itself. Phasma followed him, and they took their places at the head of the columns of FNs. 

 

General Hux had been deemed important enough to warrant being greeted by a full formation of troops; all the Stormtroopers currently aboard the ship, a total of 1,246, were arrayed behind them. It was a comforting thought for Phasma. General Hux might outrank her, but she certainly outnumbered him. 

 

For some reason, she had expected General Hux to look like an older version of the man beside her, a carbon copy of Major General Hux but with a few added gray hairs and wrinkles. In reality, General Hux didn’t look much like his son at all. He was shorter and stockier, more heavily muscled, pale-skinned but with dark hair and eyes, his movements far less stiff and severe and far more fluid. He didn’t stand to perfect attention, but held himself with his feet slightly apart and planted, arms hanging loosely at his sides. It was a stance that Phasma recognized: he was ready to spring into motion if threatened. She got the sense that General Hux could hold his own in a fistfight. 

 

Major General Hux snapped a crisp salute. “Sir,” he said. 

 

General Hux inclined his head with a lazy smile. “Armitage,” he said in answer.

 

Major General Hux rocked ever so slightly back on his heels, as if the name had been a physical blow. Phasma took a short breath in through her nose, her only concession to her anger. That hadn’t been right. This wasn’t a family reunion, it was an official meeting between two officers. The General hadn’t exactly kept his voice down, and most of the assembled Stormtroopers had just heard him address Major General Hux by his given name rather than his rank. 

 

General Hux cast his eyes over Phasma and the FNs at her back. He nodded approvingly. “Well, at least I can be glad that my Stormtroopers are still as disciplined as ever.” He smiled at Phasma as if sharing a secret with her. “I take special pride in the Stormtroopers, for obvious reasons, of course, but I have always thought that the First Order’s soldiers are our most valuable weapons.”

 

Phasma couldn’t pretend that the flash of emotion that crossed over Major General Hux’s face, and was quickly banished, was anything other than hurt. She bristled. She was starting to get an inkling of the game that was being played here, and she didn’t appreciate being made a game piece. General Hux may have been the ranking officer on the ship at that moment, but he wasn’t _her_ officer. Undermining or damaging her commanding officer would only make his orders and strategies less reliable, which would put her and her troopers at increased risk. 

 

“Now,” General Hux said, turning back to his son. “You’re aware of the reason for my visit?”

 

“I was only informed that you would be arriving for a strategic consultation,” Major General Hux said stiffly. “I trust you will enlighten me.”

 

“The Supreme Leader is very interested in this little side project of yours, especially given the amount of resources you’ve requested be… diverted for your purposes. I’ve been judged the most suitable General to evaluate the feasibility of your plans. You know I have the utmost faith in you, Armitage, but we do need to be sure that this machine is more than a lark, of course.”

 

There it was. Phasma's inkling became a certainty, and she was thankful for her helmet. It let her move her eyes to the side so she wouldn’t have to see Major General Hux’s reaction to that little speech. _The First Order’s soldiers are our most valuable weapons_. General Hux was turning this into a battle of legacies.

 

“So, is there somewhere that we can speak more privately?” General Hux finished, gesturing toward the door out of the hangar bay as if he was the host instead of the guest.

 

_Too late, damn you_ , Phasma thought. _Everything you just said would have been better behind closed doors, instead of in full sight of over a thousand troopers who need to be able to rely on their commander’s orders_. 

 

Hux turned on his heel, his hands clasped tight behind his back. “Of course, sir,” he said. “Please come with me.”

 

Phasma stayed just slightly behind the two men as they left the hangar bay, the FNs peeling out of their formations to follow them out and disperse to their duties. Major General Hux led his father to one of the fancier meeting rooms on the ship and gestured the General into the room ahead of him. Phasma made to follow her commanding officer, but as she moved to the threshold, General Hux turned and raised his eyebrow at her. 

 

“This discussion hardly seems something to be shared with a subordinate officer, does it, Armitage? Unless you feel you need a bodyguard, of course.” He chuckled, a false show of amiability.

 

Phasma froze, then stepped back. Major General Hux looked at her, conflicted, tapping his fingers against his legs, then moved to the door and leaned toward her. “Please see to your duties, Captain. I’ll speak with you later.”

 

Phasma saluted, then turned and strode off as the door shut behind her. She huffed in grim amusement at her own wounded pride. What the hell had she expected? She was only a Captain, after all. And even a Captain of the attack dogs was still a dog.

 

***

 

“Later” turned out to be four hours after the General’s arrival on board the ship. Phasma had been worried enough to be distracted from her rounds. She had found a reason to be in the corridor outside the meeting room about an hour after it had swallowed her commanding officer and the General, and had found it empty. General Hux had retired to the quarters that had been set up for him, but Major General Hux hadn’t returned to the bridge. It was unlike him. He got restless when he wasn’t in the center of everything. What had been said behind that door to change his habits so drastically?

 

Finally, as she was overseeing the afternoon drills, she saw him striding into the training theater. Her relief was short-lived; he looked like hell, paler than usual, hands curled into white-knuckled fists at his sides, eyes wide and staring the way troopers sometimes did just before they snapped and became mentally unfit for duty. He came to stand beside her, seeming as if he was a thousand miles away instead. 

 

“Sir,” she said, inclining her head toward him. 

 

He cleared his throat, started to say something, stopped, cleared his throat again. Finally, he said, “Captain, I need to consult with you on an urgent matter. Do you have time?”

 

She blinked behind her helmet. “Of course, sir,” she said.

 

“Good,” he said, quietly. “Please meet me in my private quarters in twenty minutes.”

 

Her body turned to ice. Her heart sped up so quickly that she had to gasp for breath, muffled in the private world of her helmet. There was pressure in her windpipe, a cry threatening to escape, as if she had been wounded and had to throw her head back and scream. She nodded with difficulty. She didn’t have the strength to salute, and wouldn’t even if she could have. He nodded back, hardly seeming to notice what she did, then turned and walked out of the room. 

 

She stepped up to the railing and looked down over her troopers, every one of them strong and capable, moving in unison through drills that she had designed for them, to prepare them for missions that she would lead them to the other side of, that they would have to trust her to bring them through.

 

What would she do to preserve this? What _wouldn’t_ she do?

 

She barked out the order to continue training independently until the set stopping point. Her voice was harsh and dangerous, and several of her troopers stumbled, startled or afraid. She walked out and made her way back to her own little room, allowing her footsteps to drag only when the door was closed.

 

In the refresher, she tore her helmet off and set it on the counter beside her. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, sweat standing out on her face and in the yellow stubble of her hair despite how cold everything felt. She couldn’t keep her gaze steady, it kept skittering away and to the side.

 

What wouldn’t she do? “Not this,” she gritted out to her reflection. The realization steadied her, the recognition that she had been pushed too far allowing her to meet her own eyes. 

 

She put her hand to her side, running armored fingers gently across her blaster. She had trusted someone, had let someone else guard her back, only to be hit by the blow she hadn’t thought to look for. “It’s one betrayal too many,” she said, and felt herself starting to thaw. She stood up straighter, surer. “One betrayal too many,” she repeated, touching her blaster again. 

 

She couldn’t think about what would happen to her FNs, after. That way lay madness. All she could do was set this betrayal right. It hurt too much to think through, more than anything else ever had.

 

She replaced her helmet and grabbed her datapad, requesting a route map to Major General Hux’s private quarters. She had never been in that part of the ship before. When she’d figured out where she needed to go, she threw her datapad back onto the bed and walked out, head held high. 

 

The door didn’t look any different than those around it. She wondered, as she touched the alert button on the wall, whether General Hux was staying in one of the rooms on either side. The rooms were completely soundproof; he could be right next door and not hear what she was about to do. What would he think when he found out?

 

The door swished open and she stepped over the threshold. Her heartbeat, bizarrely, slowed down when she heard the door close again behind her, sealing her in. But what did she need adrenaline for, anyway? She was certain of what she was going to do.

 

Major General Hux was standing in front of a cabinet, his officer’s greatcoat off, pouring something amber-colored out of a bottle that he held in one hand into two small glasses he held in the other. He glanced up at her, his eyes seeming much more present than they had in the training room. “Captain,” he said in greeting.

 

She glanced around the room to make sure they were completely alone, and saw that the doors that presumably led into the refresher and the bedroom were shut. She saw the heavy black greatcoat draped over the back of…

 

Her assessment stuttered to a halt, and she paused in her motion toward her blaster. In the center of the room was an alarmingly blue sofa. She blinked at it in shock. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t regulation black or grey, apart, of course, from Major General Hux’s hair, with which, she noticed as she looked back at him, it clashed rather violently. She briefly entertained the idea of telling him that, but discarded it just as quickly.

 

He took a step toward her and held out one of the glasses. She took it from him without thinking.  She had been so completely derailed that she felt a strange urge to laugh. She’d walked in here to kill him and now she was critiquing his choice of decor in her head. 

 

Major General Hux gazed into his glass, swirled the liquid slightly, drank it like a shot, then stepped back to the cabinet to refill it. He cleared his throat and turned to look at her again. She realized that if she was going to drink, too, she’d need to take off her helmet. Then she asked herself what the hell she was thinking. She’d come here for a purpose.

 

“Captain, I… That is to say…” Major General Hux closed his eyes, took a deep breath, started again with his eyes still shut. “Given our… alliance, I had hoped I could ask you for your assistance with something.”

 

_I’ll bet you had_ , Phasma thought grimly, moving her hand toward her blaster again. 

 

“I need you to kill someone for me,” he finished, blinking his eyes open again and staring at her almost defiantly.

 

She froze. 

 

Her mind went blank.

 

Then it roared back to life with a relief so overwhelming she could almost taste it.

 

He kept staring at her, and the longer she stayed silent, the stiffer his posture became. He gripped his refilled glass tight. 

 

She looked down at her own glass, then, with her free hand, reached up to remove her helmet, holding it under her arm. She met his eyes and answered, “Killing is something that I can do, sir.” Just in case she hadn’t made herself clear, she raised her glass and sipped from it. She didn’t have much experience, so all she could tell about the liquid was that it was clearly alcoholic and tasted exactly the way a campfire smells. She carefully did not make a face.

 

Major General Hux’s shoulders sagged with relief. “I appreciate your willingness to help, but I haven’t even told you the target yet.”

 

Phasma was feeling slightly giddy. She took another sip from the glass and decided that, whatever it was, she actually rather liked it. “I doubt your telling me the target will change my willingness to help, sir,” she said seriously. “Although it will, presumably, make the killing a bit easier.” 

 

He blinked at her in surprise for a second, then actually smiled slightly. “Presumably,” he said. He took a breath to brace himself, swallowed the rest of his second glass, and continued, “I need you to kill General Hux.”

 

Given the way their meeting had gone earlier, Phasma was not entirely surprised, but it still gave her pause. Yes, the General had been disrespectful and dismissive in front of troops that Major General Hux was expected to lead, but was that really enough of a reason? She didn’t really have a frame of reference, she reflected, as she carefully avoided pressing against the sore place in her mind where she kept thoughts of her parents.

 

She could have just left it there, saluted and downed the rest of her drink and gone off to figure out how she would kill their shared creator. But Major General Hux was still tense, staring absently into his glass, and she thought he might have more to say. And she was still a bit shaken by the abrupt shift in her mood and understanding of the situation. So she waited. 

 

“He wants me to discontinue my work on the weapon,” Major General Hux finally went on, in a small voice. “He’s going to tell the other Generals, the Supreme Leader, that it’s not worth the resources.”

 

“He doesn’t think it will work?” Phasma asked.

 

Hux rolled his shoulders and glared up at the ceiling. “It would be one thing if he didn’t think it would work. Then he would just be doubting _me_ , my abilities. But he doesn’t think the idea itself is worth pursuing. Captain, that’s just… That’s just complete lack of vision!” 

 

“The Stormtrooper program is his legacy,” she ventured. “He feels threatened by another project on a scale to rival it.”

 

He met her eyes. “You know I have the utmost respect for you and your fellow Stormtroopers, don’t you, Captain?”

 

She nodded. She did, actually.

 

“You’re the best soldiers the First Order has, but you’re soldiers. You can be killed, incapacitated. We’ve been fighting the Resistance for years, and everywhere around me I hear idiots lamenting that we have to fight a proxy war, that the Republic doesn’t have the courage to take the field itself. But what the _hell_ ,” he voice started to climb in volume. “Really, what the hell do they think is going to happen when we defeat the Resistance? We’ll have no choice but to go after the Republic, and the Republic has a standing army! More than that, it has a ready supply of citizens who’ll take up arms to protect it!”

 

He stopped to catch his breath. Phasma just stared. She’d never seen him this agitated, this vehement, before. 

 

“We are in the right, Captain,” he continued, quiet again. “And we have the better troops. But that won’t matter. The Republic will have the numbers to replace their soldiers faster than we can ours. If we go to war with the Republic, we will lose. And my father can’t see that.”

 

If he were any other officer, she would say something about the loyalty of the Stormtroopers, their discipline, their willingness to fight for the sake of the First Order no matter what they were facing. Part of her wanted to, just to defend her troopers. But he was right. They were the best soldiers in the galaxy, but they still died on the battlefield like any others. She felt that in this moment, finally, she didn’t have to pretend that didn’t bother her. So she stayed silent. 

 

“The weapon can reduce a planet to rubble and it doesn’t even have to be in the same system as the target. It’s better than the Death Star, even! I’ve almost got it down to a 24-hour recharging period, and I think it will be possible to target multiple planets at once. We would be able to cripple the Republic without even needing to send in troops.”

 

She took a step toward him. She thought she knew where he was heading. She wanted to hear him say it.

 

“This is how we win, Captain,” he said, holding her stare. “By keeping everyone alive on our side, and leaving none alive on theirs. We have the opportunity to truly, decisively win this war. No more fighting, just standing guard over an orderly, peaceful galaxy.”

 

There it was. _There it was_. She could _see_ it, the future he was describing. She had never even imagined it before, she had always just known that her death, the deaths of every single one of her troopers, would find them on the battlefield, in blood and fire and torn meat and broken bones. That was just the way it was. 

 

But now she could imagine something else. She could imagine a galaxy that ticked along like one of Major General Hux’s machines, running smooth and even like a well-maintained ship. She could imagine the Stormtroopers, her FNs and all the others, standing guard, just like he said, honored and steadfast and _alive._ She could imagine all their lives stretching out and out, a slow, stately half-life decay rather than a quick, gory detonation. 

 

She could grow old. She had never even entertained the thought before, but suddenly it seemed possible. She might even grow old enough to be deactivated for combat, to live her last days in real, true peace. How old would she need to be? There weren’t even procedures for such a thing as aging out of combat readiness. 

 

“Sir,” she said, cutting him off before he could say anything more. She’d already gone from considering him an ally, to wanting to kill him, to being willing to do anything and everything to keep him alive and working toward that future, all in the span of an hour. It had been exhausting. 

 

 “Yes, Captain?”

 

“I understand you, sir. You can consider it done.”

 

His shoulders slumped slightly in relief, and he nodded. “Thank you, Captain.”

 

There didn’t seem to be anything else that needed to be said, so she set her glass on a table by the arm of the sofa and turned to the door. She paused when she was almost at the threshold. She had a sudden mad desire to test the situation, to push, to _ask_ for something. 

 

“Sir,” she said, turning back toward him. He glanced up from where he had been contemplating his empty glass. “If I might bring up a different matter? I reviewed the list you sent me. The potential armors.”

 

“Oh. Of course, Captain. Do you have a preference?”

 

In Major General Hux’s frantic scramble to secure any and every scrap of material he might need for his machine, he’d ended up with custody of several panels off the hull of an old Imperial ship that had been used to transport high-level officers. She had no idea whether it would be difficult to work into armor, but it was strong, difficult to penetrate, and mirrored chrome silver. It was about as different from flat white Stormtrooper armor as it was possible to be.

 

She told him what she wanted and he just nodded, reaching for his datapad to make a note to himself. She had pushed, and she had gotten what she’d asked for. She realized that she wasn’t ready to be done asking.

 

“I want a cape, as well,” she said. One of the scattered, seemingly random memories she had of home swam up in her mind, of listening to a story about a warrior princess named Talista, a great hero with her cape the color of a midday sky and her armor the color of midnight.

 

“A… a cape?” he asked, surprised.

 

“If possible, sir,” she said and, making a quick decision, “With some red, preferably.” 

 

“Of course, Captain. Consider it done.”

 

***

 

The next time she checked her datapad, she had an encrypted message from Major General Hux that said only, _I understand that trust flows in both directions_ , followed by an access key for the First Order’s data library. Its use revealed an enormous quantity of available files and resource collections. With a mixture of amazement and alarm, she realized that he must have cloned his own access key. 

 

This was an unprecedented amount of access to be given to a Captain, especially a Stormtrooper. If anyone found out… Well, he was high enough in the ranks that it probably wouldn’t be too big of a slap on the wrist, but it would definitely be a black mark against him. It would certainly change his career trajectory. She reached under her bed for her old terminal, which she used for storing overflow files and which was no longer connected to the First Order’s network. She typed the access key into a document on the old datapad, deleted Major General Hux’s message, then erased her deleted messages. 

 

Then she settled in to read. Specifically, she settled in to see how deeply into the Stormtrooper program files she could get.

 

The first thing she tried was to find out the name of the planet she’d been taken from. Those files were not available to her, and could only be accessed with a special request to the Archives. She scrolled looking for other interesting things, and eventually settled on a file marked “Intake Procedures.”

 

Which was how she discovered that the old rumor, the one she had always discounted, was true. They really did give recruits something in their first meals, something to muddy their memories. 

 

“Adopted to promote ease of transition; approved by General Brendol Hux,” the file read, followed by a date about two years before her own “intake”.

 

“Huh,” she said to herself, momentarily numb with surprise. Then she was suddenly, blisteringly angry, which was even more of a surprise.

 

She had given so much to the First Order, willingly, loyally. She had been injured more times than she could even remember, had woken up in the medbay over and over and over again. It was bizarre that after all the physical losses of flesh and blood, it should be something so fleeting and intangible that should strike her as the thing that no one had any right to take.

 

She logged out of the key’s access and shut down her terminal. She stared at the wall for what was probably an unwarranted amount of time. Then she turned her thoughts to poison.

 

***

 

In the end, General Hux made it almost too easy. As a show of his confidence and pride in the Stormtroopers he had created, he requested to lengthen his stay so that he could accompany a unit on their next mission, putting down a Resistance-affiliated uprising on a nearby moon. The population was tiny, and there was never any question that the Stormtroopers would be victorious, or even that General Hux would be in any danger. Phasma was certain that it was just an effort to needle her commanding officer. 

 

In any event, Phasma requested that Major General Hux put her in personal command of the mission. He’d given her a slightly alarmed look, but she just tilted her helmeted head at him. She understood that he tended toward caution in these sorts of things, but they would never have a better opportunity. 

 

She’d read very widely when it came to the uses one could make of plants. She’d long ago decided that it would be a good idea to familiarize herself with their more dangerous possibilities, and the measure of security she’d gained from her alliance had given her the confidence to start accumulating some samples. 

 

All it took was a needle, when she had moved closer to him to steady him during a river crossing. The First Order had never invested in any kind of biological research division, or any understanding whatsoever of what might be encountered on the surfaces of different planets. The most botanical knowledge the First Order possessed was probably in Phasma’s little encyclopedia. So the baffled doctors back aboard the ship had assumed that he had run afoul of something on the planet and had failed to realize that his symptoms matched poisoning by a vine that grew on a watery moon two systems away.

 

She had chosen her weapon for its rarity, assuming, rightly as it turned out, that it would baffle the doctors and be impossible for them to treat in time. The fact that it took General Hux four days to die, and that the symptoms were so painful that he had to be medicated almost into a coma, were not included in her selection criteria, but she couldn’t say that she was particularly upset about it. 

 

She had the vague idea, though, that Major General Hux might be upset at the necessity of having his father killed, so when she was finished with her rounds and the duty roster showed that he was not scheduled to be on the bridge, she made her way to his quarters and buzzed for entry. It made her skin crawl to be at a superior officer’s doorway, but her trust in her commander had been restored to its proper place.    

 

When the door swished open and she stepped into the room, she found that he was sitting on the floor, an empty glass in his hand and the bottle of amber liquid half empty beside him, leaning his back against the couch. Her brief flash of concern was eased when he looked up to see her. “Five,” he said, inexplicably, and then laughed. Laughed so hard that it doubled him over, to be precise. That didn’t seem like the reaction of a heartbroken man, so she decided that she could count on him to be alright.

 

He straightened up, swiping the back of his empty hand across his eyes. “Captain,” he said, “you truly are a marvel. There’s not a single aspect of the operation I would have changed.” He gestured to the open cabinet, then to the floor beside him, so she crossed to retrieve the spare glass and then sat down, pulling off her helmet and setting it beside her.

 

She held out the glass, and he lifted the bottle up to fill it. “Thank you, Captain,” he said softly. “My sincerest thanks.”

 

“Of course, sir,” she said, and, after a moment’s hesitation, “I believe you may be intoxicated, sir.”

 

Major General Hux snorted with laughter as he tipped the bottle to refill his own glass. “I have never been intoxicated in my life, Captain,” he said. “I could probably take a bridge shift right now. But I figured a bit of celebration was in order. I’m glad you decided to join me.”

 

Strangely, she was glad, too. She took a deep drink from her glass. She liked it even better than she had the last time.

 

Three hours later, she couldn’t decide whether she, like Major General Hux, had never been intoxicated in her life, or whether she was just at that moment experiencing intoxication for the first time. They had polished off the last of the bottle, and another had been opened. 

 

“It’s whiskey, actually,” he was telling her. “The really good stuff comes from the major distilleries in the Republic, but we don’t have access to those. Well, yet. This is a pretty good approximation I found a couple years ago, though. To tide me over until we’ve taken over the best producers.” He tossed back his glass and laughed again, tilting his head back so that his hair spread out over the fabric of the couch. 

 

“You know,” she said slowly, considering her words with solemn care, “that couch clashes with your hair.”

 

He blinked at her in surprise, then glanced back at the couch, then looked back at her, indignant. “Captain,” he said, straightening his posture as if he was about to give a speech sitting on his floor, “the right shade of blue goes with everything.”

 

She couldn’t help it, she burst out laughing. “Sir,” she said when she could breathe again, “that is _not_ the right shade.”

 

He looked like he was about to argue the point, but instead started laughing, too. That just made her laugh harder. She had no idea what was wrong with her, she hadn’t laughed in years, but she was enjoying the experience. 

 

Or at least she was until, caught in the throes of her laughter, she accidentally leaned a little too far and brushed her shoulder against his. She recoiled, her heart jumping into her throat and her mind racing— _she hadn’t wanted to touch her commanding officer, she didn’t know what kinds of thoughts that could plant in his mind, was there a way to fix this if the situation went bad?_ —before she realized, to her bewilderment, that he’d jerked away from her just as quickly, hissing a breath in between his teeth. 

 

They sat like that for a moment, leaning away from each other and looking straight ahead. Phasma wondered if she should leave. It was probably the safest course of action. 

 

Before she could make up her mind, Major General Hux reached for the bottle and refilled his glass, then held it out in her direction, making an effort to meet her eyes. She positioned her own glass under the mouth of the bottle and let him pour for her, and the tension dissipated. 

 

When she finally got up to go, some time later, Major General Hux snapped his fingers and stumbled to his feet after her. “I almost forgot, Captain,” he said, vanishing into some interior room and returning a moment later trying to steer a large box on a lev-cart. “I got this back from the armorer for you. I meant to have it delivered tomorrow, but as long as you’re here…” He pushed the cart toward her.

 

She lifted one foot to steady it and was extremely shocked when she nearly lost her balance. She hadn’t expected alcohol to have so substantial an effect. She managed to turn the stumble into a stutter-step forward, around the edge of the cart to where she could take hold of the handle. 

 

“Goodnight, Sir,” she said over her shoulder, lifting her helmet to fit it back into place.

 

“Goodnight, Captain.”

 

She walked a bit slower than normal through the corridors, trying to keep from losing her balance where anyone could see. Finally, she made it back to her own quarters. It must have been a side-effect of the alcohol, but when she opened the box to see the gleam of perfect, polished silver, she made a noise like a contented sigh. 

 

Carefully, she took each piece of the new armor out of the box and placed it on the stand in the corner where she had kept her old armor. Finally, last of all, she took the cape, made of the same heavy, coarse material as an officer’s greatcoat but with a border around the edges dyed vivid red, out of the box and swirled it around the shoulders of the armor. Then she stood back to take it all in.

 

She had to swallow several times and blink very rapidly to get her body back under her control. It didn’t look anything like the regulation standard. She wouldn’t look like anyone else, wearing this. She kept repeating that thought over and over, like it was the most important thing. 

 

She stepped forward and buried one hand, still gauntleted in white and black, in the fabric of the cape. She could have chosen green. It was her favorite color, a color she always associated with life and growing things. But the red was better. Red was also a color of life, after all, and she had seen it often enough, painted across her own body. 

 

The color and chrome shine seemed so strange beside the gray of pretty much everything else in the room. With a snort of laughter, she decided that it was hypocritical of her to criticize Major General Hux for wanting that bright spot of blue in his quarters. It made a difference, although she wasn’t quite sure what kind. The fact that there was red and shining silver in this gray room made all the difference in the world. 

 

***

 

Two months after that, she was caught in an explosion when one of her troopers set off a mine during a mission. She woke up in the medbay with a doctor hovering over her. 

 

“Mission status,” was the first thing she managed to croak out, her throat catching on the words.

 

The doctor frowned in disapproval, but at least she answered her question. “Your mission was successful, even with you unconscious. Seven troopers dead, including two in the explosion. Nine with major injuries, twenty-two with minor injuries. You’re being treated for a concussion, three broken ribs, a fractured pelvis, and some internal bleeding. We were instructed to wait until you regained consciousness before beginning treatment, so you could make a choice between standard treatment and RBTR.”

 

A choice? Why would she be given a choice? Standard treatment took a couple of days to repair a broken bone, so Stormtroopers were always given RBTR, or rapid bone/tissue regrowth, which took only hours and was enormously painful. 

 

She glanced over at the small table by her bedside. There was a small glass resting on it that she thought she recognized. The doctor saw where she was looking and said, “The Major General was here for a few minutes, to personally discuss the treatment options. He asked that that be left there.”

 

Phasma had the sudden urge to smile, which she suppressed. Well, that explained things.

 

“The RBTR, please,” she said. She appreciated the gesture of respect, but she had responsibilities to get back to. No sense wasting time. 

 

She blacked out during the procedure, and when she came to again, the doctor informed her that she was repaired enough to leave, but that she should take it easy in training for the next 24 hours. She thanked the doctor, put her armor back on, and took the glass with her when she left.

 

She only realized when she was standing in front of his door that she hadn’t checked the duty roster. He could be on the bridge. But the door opened when she requested entry. He was sitting at a little table in the corner, tapping at his datapad with his brows furrowed in frustration, but he looked pleased when he saw her standing in his doorway. 

 

“Captain Phasma,” he said. “I’m glad to see you out of the medbay.”

 

“Thank you, sir,” she answered, holding up the glass so he could see it and taking off her helmet. 

 

He nodded and stood, crossing to the cabinet to pull out the bottle and the other glass. “To your continued good health, Captain,” he said as he poured the whiskey for both of them, and they clinked the glasses together before drinking. 

 

“I’d like to debrief this latest mission, Captain,” he went on. “It’s a testament to the discipline you’ve instilled in your troopers that they were able to achieve the directives without your presence, but the mine that knocked you unconscious is of a design I haven’t seen before. The Resistance seems to be innovating. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on training for more such encounters in the future.”

 

“Of course, sir,” Phasma said. “But, if I may…” she paused, unsure, but she had come here to ask for something. She wanted to, she had the _right_ to. She had helped him when he needed her, and she wanted to know that she could expect him to do the same. “I wanted to ask for your assistance with something.”

 

“I… Of course, Captain. Whatever’s within my power.”

 

She held his eyes. “I would like you to kill someone for me.”

 

He was surprised for a moment, but there was no hesitation when he answered. “Captain,” he said with a small, genuine smile, “killing is something I can do.” He raised his glass again, and she clinked her own against it.


	9. Hux, 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains original character death.

**_Hux, 29_ **

 

“Hands up. Hands _up_ , sir,” Captain Phasma said, and he sheepishly lifted his fists slightly higher in front of his cheekbones. “No, not that high, now you’re obstructing your vision. There, that’s better. Try to hit me again.”

 

She had told him that he favored the jab too much. It was a quick, economical movement that appealed to him in its simplicity, but his overuse of it made him predictable. Maybe he could use that to his advantage? He tensed his shoulders, dropping the left as if he was about to twist into a jab, then tried to quickly step out, plant his left foot, and slide into a kick with his right leg. 

 

As usual, she gave absolutely nothing away, damn her. Her upper body and her face might as well have been carved from stone as she bent her legs, lowering herself and sweeping her right arm across her body so that, instead of impacting the side of her stomach, his shin cracked against the bone of her forearm. 

 

Before he could even think about how her arms were practically made of stone and how much his shin hurt, she brought her left arm down to trap his leg between her arms, twisting her body to the left as she did so and pulling him completely off balance. Then he landed on his ass, right leg still held up in the air. 

 

He struggled to get back the breath that had been knocked out of him, scowling up at her. Her mouth twisted slightly to one side in a way that he’d long ago decided meant she was amused by something. He was glad that she’d agreed to help him with private training sessions; that would have been extremely embarrassing if any of his subordinates had seen him. Well, any of his other subordinates, but Captain Phasma hardly counted as one. She was his ally. 

 

He tried to tug his leg out of her grip and failed. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Why were you off balance?” she asked.

 

“Because you pulled my leg out from under me,” he said, sounding petulant even to his own ears.

 

“You were already off balance when the kick landed. Why was that?”

 

He knew the answer, frustrating as it was to admit. Through gritted teeth, he muttered, “I didn’t step out enough.”

 

She finally released his leg. His shin felt like someone had set off a small bomb inside it. “With all due respect, sir,” Captain Phasma continued, “your idea of planting your foot is turning it sideways at the ankle. You have to actually take a _step_ to balance the momentum of the kick.”

 

He stood up, wincing, and brushed idly at the front of his training clothes. “Point taken, Captain. Shall we try again?”

 

Luckily, he was rescued from having to try again by an alert from his datapad, stashed on the side of the room with his uniform. 

 

“You’ve been rescued, sir,” Captain Phasma said dryly, and he glared at her over his shoulder as he crossed to pick it up and read the message. 

 

“Ha!” he shouted triumphantly, turning the datapad toward Captain Phasma. She didn’t bother to read the message, just nodded at him.

 

“Dead?” she asked.

 

“Everyone on the ship,” he said. “Colonel Vengal was the last. He expired roughly seven hours after the initial exposure.” 

 

She looked up at the ceiling, a tight smile on her face. “Six,” she said.

 

“Six,” Hux echoed.

 

“Was video taken in the medbay of the Colonel’s unfortunate decline, sir?”

 

“Of course. It’s attached to the official report on the incident. You’ll be able to access it using my key. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to warn you that the Colonel’s last hours were quite… unpleasant.” Hux raised an eyebrow at her, and Captain Phasma responded with a wolfish, teeth-baring grin that made Hux very glad that she was an ally and not an enemy. “I trust it was worth the wait?” he asked, feeling inexplicably anxious. 

 

“It was indeed, sir,” she said, stretching her arms out over her head and closing her eyes. “I appreciate the assistance.”

 

“Any time, Captain.” He had no idea what Colonel Vengal had done to warrant her displeasure, although he had a few theories based on his conversations with her. He didn’t intend to ask her for the full story. If she wanted the man dead, that was enough for him. It had been pathetically easy to gain the Colonel’s trust over the course of the past year; Vengal had only gotten to his rank through favoritism that had since evaporated, leaving his career stalled. He had been looking for a new patron, and had been eager to ingratiate himself with Hux, despite the fact that Hux was at least three decades younger. 

 

Hux had only brought up Captain Phasma once to Vengal, by asking him during a seemingly casual conversation about his experiences being in charge of the first Stormtrooper officers. 

 

“It was a decent assignment, I suppose,” Vengal had said. “You’ve got the FNs under your command now, I recall. I remember working with Lieutenant Phasma. Or Captain now.” Vengal had smiled in a way that Hux couldn’t decipher but decided that he didn’t like. Then Vengal had shrugged and said, “Anyway, Stormtroopers are Stormtroopers. They’re obviously not going to be the same as an Academy-trained officer.”

 

He’d looked at Hux with his eyebrows raised, as if expecting agreement. Hux had stared at him until his smile had vanished, then said severely, “I quite agree. I’ve found that Captain Phasma’s performance of her duties far exceeds any Academy-trained officer I’ve worked with.”

 

Colonel Vengal was stomach-turningly deferential after that, so Hux put aside his irritation with the man and pretended to trust the man (although he made damned sure he never asked Captain Phasma to be in the same room as him).

 

Given the situation, the Colonel hadn’t thought it was at all strange when Hux had feigned illness and asked him to take his place accompanying General Gast to review the planet Hux had chosen for the installation of Starkiller. Hux had insinuated to Vengal that he needed a spy among Gast’s people, and the Colonel had seen visions of promotion dancing before his eyes. 

 

Hux had taken a moment, the night before their departure, to examine the shuttle that would be transporting Vengal, Gast, and four of Gast’s favorite junior officers to the planet. It had provided him an opportunity to carefully sabotage the radiation shielding, along with the monitors and alerts that would warn anyone what he’d done. By the time the leak was discovered, radiation poisoning had progressed too far to be reversed. Ships’ engines were powerful things, and it hadn’t taken long for the bodies of everyone on board to be unsalvageable. After that, it was merely a matter of waiting for the inevitable.

 

Hux was rather proud of the message he’d sent informing the other high officers of Gast’s death. He’d used just the right amount of dignified sorrow, and managed to subtly stress the point that he’d intended to be on the same ship. The barest suggestion that this might have been an assassination targeted at derailing the progress on Starkiller, coupled with an expression of commitment to continuing the project, as Gast would have wanted. They didn’t need to know how much Hux and Gast, the ostensible commander of the Starkiller effort, had argued behind closed doors about how the project should proceed. 

 

He would be free, now, to move the project forward the right way. Captain Phasma’s obvious pleasure at Vengal’s painful demise just made the moment better. 

 

He turned the datapad back around and read the rest of the message. His grin widened, baring his teeth, and he said to Captain Phasma, “I was right. General Gast has left an opening, and it’s going to me. I’m being promoted to General, effective…” He blinked in surprise. “Immediately. Effective immediately, not at the start of the next cycle.”

 

“They’re wasting no time,” Captain Phasma answered. “Congratulations, sir.”

 

“I’ll be saying that to you soon enough,” Hux said. “Now I’ll be able to figure out what ridiculous excuse the Generals had for bouncing my request to promote you to Major.”

 

“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” she responded, wryly. She trusted him, he knew, but had little faith in any other officers. Well, that was something they had in common.

 

“Oh, here’s something good,” Hux said as he continued reading. “I’m being placed in charge of the Stormtrooper program. I trust you’re prepared to offer some input into possible improvements.”

 

“I am. I’ll prepare a list.”

 

The slightly tight note in her voice made him look up. “Is there something you would like to add?”

 

Captain Phasma frowned. “As a matter of fact, sir, I have an immediate suggestion, if I may.”

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“I understand that there is a food additive for new recruits, designed to limit their memories. It should be discontinued.”

 

“Really?” Hux asked, surprised. “It’s intended to make the transition easier.” He briefly wondered whether it would have made things better for him, those first few years with his father, if he could have completely forgotten about his mother, but he quickly redirected those thoughts elsewhere. Thinking about his mother was uncomfortable and didn’t do him any good. 

 

“It makes nothing easier, sir,” Captain Phasma said, with unusual vehemence. “My advice would be to cease its use.”

 

“Of course, Captain,” Hux said. “Your insight is always appreciated. I’ll have it removed from the intake procedures immediately.”

 

He made a note on his datapad, then tried to look casual as he said, “I’m sure you’ll want to review the video. Shall we meet after my last bridge shift?”

 

“Nice try, sir,” Captain Phasma answered. “We’ve still got this training room reserved for twenty-seven minutes.” He sighed and moved back into the center of the room. “Look on the bright side,” she said, raising her fists and setting her feet. “There’s still a chance you’ll land a good hit in that time, sir.”

 

***

 

He didn’t manage to land a good hit, but Captain Phasma told him that his body position on the kicks was improving, which was a small consolation. He was on the bridge for the next six hours, and when his last shift ended, he had only been in his quarters for a few moments before the request for entry chimed.

 

He let Captain Phasma in, and she immediately crossed to the couch, throwing herself down onto it and sighing contentedly. The corner of her mouth was turned up in a slight smile. He poured the drinks and took a seat next to her.

 

“I take it you reviewed the highlights of the medbay video?” he asked.

 

“To use your own words, sir, there’s not a single aspect of the operation that I would have changed.”

 

“I am glad, Captain,” he said, raising his glass toward her in salute. Then, because he thought that there was no reason her good day couldn’t get better, he picked up his datapad and flipped it toward her so that she could see that the order had already gone through to change the Stormtrooper intake procedures as she had suggested. She nodded approvingly and took a sip from her glass.

 

Captain Phasma was unusually talkative, seeming more at ease then he’d ever seen her, and by the time they were on their second glasses Hux found himself listening to a discussion of the native flora and fauna of the last planet the FNs had been deployed to. Hux never noticed those things; he didn’t feel very comfortable on planet surfaces, and tried to think about their biosphere and topography only as far as was necessary for the mission. Captain Phasma, on the other hand, seemed to notice _everything_. 

 

He had long since lost the thread of what exactly she was describing, something about different types of insects being drawn to different colors of flowers, but he had no intention of interrupting her, so he watched her attentively and hoped he was nodding in the right places. 

 

At least he did until his datapad chimed with an urgent message. He rolled his eyes and reached for it, then sucked in a breath when he saw that the message came from the Supreme Leader of the First Order himself. He frowned as he read it, looking up sharply at Captain Phasma. She immediately tensed.

 

“What is it, sir?”

 

“I’m to take the _Finalizer_ to rendezvous with the _Supremacy_. The Supreme Leader has requested that I meet with him in person.”

 

“Is that unusual, sir?”

 

“From everything I’ve heard, the Supreme Leader only communicates via hologram. I’ve never even spoken to him. No one has, except for the Generals.”

 

“Well, there’s a first time for everything, sir, and you’re a General now. Maybe he wants to congratulate you on your promotion.”

 

Hux snorted a laugh, trying to ignore his nerves. “I’m sure that’s it, Captain.” _Or maybe he knows I killed Gast and wants to look me in the eyes when he sentences me to execution. But that’s stupid, he wouldn’t have sent me the promotion if he were just going to kill me. But maybe he’s lulling me into a false sense of security…_

 

Hux shook his head, irritated at the useless, circling thoughts. There was no avoiding this meeting, and it would give him valuable information that he could turn to his advantage.

 

“I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid we’ll have to cut the celebration short, Captain,” he said, feeling guilty even thought her face didn’t show any displeasure. “The meeting is set for three hours from now, I’ll have to get to the bridge to make sure we make the rendezvous.”

 

“Of course, sir. I’ll return to my duties unless you need me.”

 

“Thank you, Captain.”

 

***

 

The _Supremacy_ loomed large in the ship’s viewscreen the moment they exited hyperspace, bigger even than the _Finalizer_ , a dark smear against the stars. He’d been instructed to board the other ship and meet the Supreme Leader on his own ground. It wasn’t ideal, but he told himself that it wouldn’t be a disadvantage unless he let it be.

 

He took an individual shuttle and turned down the hangar master’s offer of a pilot. Hux wasn’t the best pilot in the world, but he could get a shuttle from one ship to another without incident. He briefly considered asking Captain Phasma to accompany him, but she wouldn’t be able to follow him into the meeting, and he worried that having her close by would lull him into a false sense of security.

 

In the _Supremacy_ ’s hangar, he was met by a pair of red-clad guards, their armor striking him as familiar. A reworking of an old Imperial style, probably. He followed them through the labyrinthine twists and turns of the ship, until they finally led him to a heavy door and took up positions on either side of it. He took a deep breath and stepped up to the door, then through it as it swished open. 

 

For a moment, he thought he’d been struck in the head, or possibly suffered some kind of catastrophic brain bleed, but no. The room really was entirely red, walls, floor, and ceiling, a deep, visceral red that put him uncomfortably in mind of being swallowed down the throat of some enormous, predatory creature. The room was also enormous, with a path down the center leading to an actual throne. And on the throne…

 

It could only have been the Supreme Leader. Hux had made a point of familiarizing himself with as many sentient species inhabiting the galaxy as possible, and he had never seen anything like this. The Supreme Leader was humanoid, but even sitting, Hux could tell that it was enormously tall, its body seeming stretched and thin with a large, unevenly shaped head and small eyes. Its skin was almost gray and looked somehow desiccated. 

 

Beside the throne stood another figure, dressed head to toe in black, helmet, robes, gloves, and boots. This figure seemed very small next to the Supreme Leader, but stood taller than Hux by a couple of inches. Hanging from the black belt was a metal cylinder that Hux recognized, with mingled revulsion and fear, as the hilt of a lightsaber. 

 

“General,” said the Supreme Leader. “So good of you to join us.” Its voice sounded male, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Whatever kind of creature the Supreme Leader was, Hux felt reasonably sure it didn’t originate in this galaxy. 

 

Hux cleared his throat and tried to get a handle on the shock that must be clear on his face. “Supreme Leader,” he said, and saluted. “You wanted to speak with me?” He couldn’t say anything more; he had to grit his teeth against a wave of uneasiness, a restless feeling in the back of his mind that made his pulse pick up.

 

“Of course, General, of course,” the Supreme Leader went on, an unreadable smile on his strange face. “But first, I must introduce you to my apprentice.” The Supreme Leader gestured to the black-clad figure. “This is Kylo Ren, the Lord of my Knights of Ren.”

 

Hux had never heard of the Knights of Ren. The Supreme Leader seemed to have been counting on that. He certainly seemed smug enough as he went on. 

 

“The Knights of Ren are my elite, Force-sensitive warriors. I trained them myself to destroy all remnants of the Jedi Order. Lord Ren has led them well, and I suspect you and he will be seeing much more of each other. You represent the two sides of my strategy, after all.”

 

“Strategy?” Hux managed to choke out. The restlessness in his brain was growing worse. It felt like he was having to wrestle himself into line. His heart was pounding now, and his uniform felt scratchy and uncomfortable against his skin, as if his nerves were all sending him too much input. It felt like something was building and growing under his rib cage, like any second it would start to press agains his lungs and squeeze the air out of him.

 

Even as he struggled, though, he found his thoughts racing. Force users. There were damned Force users in the First Order. And if the Supreme Leader had personally trained them… Had his father known? Did the other Generals know now?

 

The old Empire had had a Force user at its head, but it had been brought down by the same Force. Hux didn’t pretend to understand what the Force was or what it did, but from his study of its history, it didn’t seem to be the kind of weapon you could use to achieve a military victory. Every time it entered the historical record, it seemed to be wielded in the service of individual desires and goals, regardless of what else was going on. The Force had no place in the First Order. How could he possibly serve under a Force user?

 

The Supreme Leader didn’t answer him right away. Instead, he turned his head to look at his apprentice, Lord Ren. Ren, in turn, shifted so that the front of his helmet was pointed directly at Hux. 

 

Then, and completely unexpectedly, Hux’s brain exploded. The restlessness in his head erupted into what felt uncomfortably like squirming motion, and finally he realized where it was coming from. He hadn’t been troubled by that _thing_ taking up space in the back of his mind since he had crushed it down mercilessly after Sedge’s murder attempt. It was back, awake, demanding he use it. 

 

It had to be because one of them, the Supreme Leader or his apprentice, had reached out to touch his mind with the Force. He knew they had that power, to reach into the minds of others and control or take. Which meant…

 

No. _No, no, no, no!_ He was a soldier, a tactician, an engineer. He was not a wizard, he was not a zealot, not a superstitious, selfish, unreliable renegade. He would not allow himself to be altered or remade.

 

It seemed to take an eternity to wrestle back control of his mind, to quell the rebellion in his own thoughts. He imagined himself building a wall between himself, what was truly a part of him, and the other presence, the Force, brick by brick separating himself from it. Even as he was doing that, though, he realized that he could feel the intrusion that had started all of this, piercing into his brain in seeming slow motion. Much as he hated to do so, he kept a single tendril of the Force free, using it to smooth the edges of his thoughts, to make them slippery enough to turn the invader aside, hoping against hope that he had been subtle enough to avoid his actions being noticed. It was his own head, and there was nowhere he knew better. That would have to be enough. 

 

When he came back to himself, he expected hours, days, even, to have passed. Nothing had changed. He felt like he’d lived a lifetime waging war inside his own head, but it must have only been a split second. 

 

“Indeed, General,” the Supreme Leader said, and Hux had to scramble to remember what had been going on in the conversation before he had been indisposed. “Lord Ren and his Knights will head off any threats coming from those with the gift of wielding the Force. They make the most dangerous enemies, but we will have many other enemies, as well. I am very interested in the weapon you have been building. You have certainly defended it with admirable ferocity.” 

 

The Supreme Leader smiled slightly, and Hux felt a sick twist of understanding. He knew. Maybe not only about Gast, but about the other life that Hux had taken for the weapon.

 

“I believe in its potential, Supreme Leader,” Hux answered, voice neutral. 

 

“As do I, General. I hope to see my faith rewarded very soon. You have already selected a suitable planet for its construction? Given General Gast’s untimely death, and the fact that you are now the sole commander of the project, I see no reason not to begin installation immediately.”

 

Hux’s heart leaped. “I am in complete agreement, Supreme Leader. I have the timetables already prepared and can send them for your review by the end of the day.”

 

The Supreme Leader waved a hand. “That won’t be necessary. I trust you to see to the details.”

 

Hux felt a moment of pride at that, although it was accompanied by the sneaking suspicion that the Supreme Leader was motivated less by trust in Hux than by valuing the Force-using side of operations more highly. _The gift of wielding the Force_ , indeed. 

 

“I am placing you in command of the military side of the First Order’s operations,” the Supreme Leader went on.

 

Hux nearly frowned. The military side of operations? That was the only side. The First Order _was_ a military. Unless, the unpleasant thought occurred to him, the Supreme Leader really did see whatever his Knights of Ren were doing as of equal importance to the literally _everything_ else. 

 

Then the rest of what the Supreme Leader said caught up to him. “In command, Supreme Leader?” he asked. The Generals had always commanded in council, as they had in the old Empire, with the Supreme Leader as the final authority. 

 

The Supreme Leader nodded. “Effective immediately, all other Generals will report to you, as Commander of our forces.”

 

Hux had the inane wish that there was a chair he could sit down in. This was completely unprecedented. He would have more power than any other General in the First Order’s history. 

 

“With Lord Ren as your Co-Commander, of course,” the Supreme Leader continued.

 

Hux’s good mood vanished as quickly as it had come. Co-Commander? There were well over 300,000 souls in the First Order. How many fucking Knights of Ren were there, that Lord Ren’s leadership was going to be placed on the same level as his own? 

 

He quickly discarded the urge to break down the wall in his mind and attack them with the Force, just to show them that their precious little club wasn’t as good at keeping out the riffraff as they thought. That was insane, though. It would be unpleasant in the extreme to share power with the Supreme Leader’s apprentice, but his own power would still be beyond anything he had hoped for or expected. It would have to do. 

 

“Of course, Supreme Leader,” Hux said. “I look forward to my collaboration with Lord Ren.”

 

Lord Ren, infuriatingly, made a sound, distorted by what must be a vocoder built into his helmet, that sounded like a derisive snort of laughter. Hux would have been shocked by this indiscipline, and by the fact that the Supreme Leader didn’t seem inclined to correct it, but it seemed to fit well with the impression he’d gathered of Force users.

 

“I trust you’ve already chosen the forces that will man and protect your weapon?” the Supreme Leader asked.

 

“I have, Supreme Leader. I plan to assign the FN Stormtroopers.”

 

The Supreme Leader smirked. “Of course. They’re almost your own private division at this point.”

 

Hux narrowly avoided frowning. “I have a very high regard for the FNs. They have proved their merit many times, and they are led well by Captain Phasma. Of course, now that I’m the commanding General, I will promote her to-”

 

“I don’t consider that to be necessary,” the Supreme Leader said, cutting Hux off. “She has served well as a Captain, I see no reason why she shouldn’t continue to do so.”

 

Hux opened his mouth to argue, then paused, considering the situation. His mutually beneficial partnership with Captain Phasma was well known. He hadn’t exactly made any effort to hide the fact that he considered her particular allegiance to him to be his most valuable asset. The Supreme Leader likely thought that allowing Captain Phasma to climb the ranks as far as she deserved would strengthen Hux’s own position, upset the balance between Hux and Lord Ren. 

 

He shut his mouth with a feeling of anger and something uncomfortably like shame. He didn’t like feeling as if his alliance with Captain Phasma had become a liability for her, so he redirected his fury toward the Supreme Leader, reflecting that the creature clearly had no idea how to manage a military as complex and important as the First Order. 

 

_It will be up to you to keep the Order running_ , Hux thought to himself, aiming for a tone of put-upon resignation but accidentally infusing a bit too much pride. 

 

“I understand, Supreme Leader,” he said. 

 

“Good. That will be all, General. Please return to your duties.”

 

“I look forward to our collaboration too, General,” Lord Ren said, voice unmistakably sarcastic. Hux ground his teeth but decided not to respond to that. He saluted and turned sharply toward the door.

 

On his way out, he thought he felt the slightest touch against his mind, a parting shot by either master or apprentice. He forced himself not to react, heart in his throat.

 

***

 

The first thing he did when he set foot on his own ship again was breath a sigh of relief. The second thing was send a message to Captain Phasma requesting that she meet with him at her earliest convenience. 

 

Apparently she had responded as soon as she received the message, because she was waiting outside the door to his quarters by the time he got there. He let her in wordlessly and crossed to his liquor cabinet as soon as the door was closed behind him. She’d already taken her helmet off an tossed it onto the couch by the time he turned around with two full glasses. 

 

She didn’t ask him anything, just raised an eyebrow. That was all it took to start the words flowing, and before he really knew what had happened, he’d ranted at her for nearly thirty minutes about the incompetence of the Supreme Leader, the useless complications of Force users, and _just how fucking much_ he did not want to be Co-Commanders with the Supreme Leader’s little pet apprentice. 

 

He realized that his voice had been climbing in both volume and pitch until he was nearly shouting, far more shrilly than he was exactly comfortable with. He was lucky that his quarters were soundproofed. He made himself stutter to a halt, standing still and breathing in and out slowly. He realized he hadn’t touched his glass, and downed it in one swallow. 

 

After several long moments of silence, Captain Phasma cleared her throat. “Well, sir, that all sounds irritating in the extreme, but if I might offer an observation?” Hux nodded jerkily. “The Supreme Leader seems to be granting his full support to Starkiller. And you’ve had to share power with less qualified and less suitable individuals before. I’ve never…” She seemed to be considering her words. “I’ve never seen you this distressed before.” 

 

She looked at him expectantly, the meaning clear. She knew that something else had to have happened to upset him this much. He found his hands suddenly trembling, and he had to set his glass down on the table.

 

There was nowhere on the ship safer than here. He had checked the entire suite of rooms for bugs as soon as he’d taken up residence, and performed new checks once a week. If he was going to tell her, it would have to be here. And if he was going to tell anyone, it was going to be her. 

 

But was he really safe? Could he ever be safe now? If his father had ever found out, he would probably have been turned over to the Supreme Leader immediately, whatever it took to help his father claw a bit more status and position out of the situation. That could have been him behind a mask, gallivanting from planet to planet on useless missions instead of helping to change the galaxy. The thought made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. 

 

His father was dead, though. Thanks to Captain Phasma. She was his ally. She was utterly dependable. 

 

He took a deep breath, and then he told her. He had to keep his eyes on the floor, and when he was done, it took all of his willpower to raise his eyes and look her in the face. 

 

She was looking at him consideringly. What did that mean? He couldn’t read her as well as she could read him. Was she…?

 

“Am I correct in assuming,” Captain Phasma said slowly, “that you would prefer not to be Force-sensitive?”

 

“Of course I would!” Hux sputtered.

 

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, why is that? Couldn’t you use it, turn it toward your own purposes?”

 

Hux paused, considering it for a moment, before shaking his head, nervously twisting his hands together. “If I try to figure out how to use it, I won’t be able to hide it. I’ll have to work with Lord Ren, and I haven’t spent years doing this the way he has. I have a handle on it now, but I don’t know if the same thing that happened today will happen every time I’m in the proximity of a Force user. If I slip up…” He couldn’t finish the thought. He didn’t honestly know what would happen, but his mind filled in the blank with visions of being taken away from his command, isolated in some ridiculous training regimen, uselessly sidelined. 

 

“I’ve read, although there’s some debate about it, that people who aren’t Force-sensitive can learn to use the Force,” Captain Phasma went on. “Supposedly, it takes a great deal of effort and time, but it can be done. So if it can be gained, perhaps it can also be lost?”

 

Hux had to lean against the wall, he was so relieved. He was overwhelmingly glad that he had chosen to confide in Captain Phasma. Of course, of course she kept her head and figured out the best course of action. He was good at research, he could figure this out.

 

“As always, Captain, your insight is exactly what is needed.”

 

She offered him one of her rare smiles. “Glad to help, sir.”


	10. Phasma, 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains original character death of a character who doesn't deserve it, because villains are going to villain.

**_Phasma, 27_ **

 

The journey in the shuttle was mostly silent. Phasma sat in the co-pilot’s seat, watching General Hux at the controls out of the corner of her eye. They had taken a roundabout route, with several different hyperspace jumps to confuse any pursuit or surveillance, so the trip had taken several hours. He had insisted that they not bring any soldiers with them as guards, not even some of her FNs, not wanting word to get back to the Supreme Leader about what they were doing. She was nervous about what would happen when they reached the planet’s surface. Would she be able to protect both of them on her own?

 

She had tried a couple of times to start a conversation with General Hux, hoping to bring him out of his own head, but not even questions about Starkiller could hold his attention for long. He gripped the steering controls with white knuckles, staring straight ahead. The shadows under his eyes were even darker than usual, and his pale face and glassy eyes made him look feverish. 

 

This mission was probably a bad idea. He was emotionally compromised. She wouldn’t be able to count on him to protect himself and look out for potential threats, so she would have to do enough work for the both of them. She would have advised him to wait until he was calmer, but she had known she would be unable to convince him. The best she could do was accompany and protect him. 

 

He had becoming more and more agitated over the past few months, as his research failed to turn up the fix he’d been hoping for. It hadn’t helped that they’d had to run a few joint missions with Lord Ren, who had proven to be a nuisance in more ways than one, pushing against and challenging General Hux’s authority, in addition to frequently losing his temper, destroying equipment, and putting the crew of the _Finalizer_ on edge. General Hux’s patience was fraying quite dangerously.  

 

The planet’s surface scrolled by below them, barren, rocky tundra, the sky gloomy due to the constant clouds and the distance from the system’s sun. Seithr was a backwater by any definition, but General Hux’s research had been very thorough. He had found this particular resident of Seithr despite the man’s low profile. 

 

The building that finally came into view over the horizon didn’t particularly look like a temple to Phasma. It looked more like a squat, wide, circular hut. It was made of scraps, it seemed, part stone, part metal, part plastic. The roof was peaked, to keep off rain, and as they came closer, she could see that it was surrounded on all sides by wild-looking gardens, chaotic tangles of deep green. They made her uncomfortable; she wanted to walk around in them and explore, but she had other things to do here. 

 

General Hux set the shuttle down just beyond the ring of gardens, and they carefully picked their way through the growing things to the door of the temple hut. Phasma carefully ignored the plants and kept her eyes moving behind her faceplate, scanning for any potential threats. None presented themselves. There weren’t even any other dwellings in view, and nothing moved besides the leaves and stems around them, swaying in the wind. She wondered how the man in the hut managed to make them grow here, in this barren place. She knew she wouldn’t get a chance to ask. 

 

The door was not locked or barred in any way. General Hux pushed it open and strode into the hut. Phasma wished he would have let her go first; as it was, she had to hurry in behind him, on alert for a possible attack. 

 

The man they had come to see was the only person in the hut, and he was not armed. He sat calmly in a soft-looking chair beside a small heater, scrolling idly through a datapad. He looked up when they came in, a bland smile on his face.

 

He was not what Phasma had expected. He wasn’t old and bearded and robes, with wise and grave eyes passing judgment on all they saw. He was a very ordinary-looking middle-aged man, dressed in a simple tunic, pants, and boots that one could probably have seen on any of the farmers on Phasma’s long-ago home planet. Nothing in the hut was grand or mysterious in the hut. Everything was functional, and nothing seemed out of place. 

 

General Hux shared her surprise. He looked around in confusion as the man watched them, not saying anything or changing his expression. Finally, he turned to the man and asked, “You’re the Devotee?”

 

The man laughed at that. “People call me that around here, sometimes. I am just a man who has studied the Force, who has made an effort to understand its workings.” The man stood. Phasma tensed, hand on her blaster. “Can I offer you anything? Tea?” the man said, moving toward a small stove, curving along a stretch of the hut’s wall. 

 

“No,” General Hux said shortly. The man shrugged and pulled a single cup out of a cupboard, fiddling with a kettle that rested on the stove. “Are you Force-sensitive?” General Hux asked.

 

The man shook his head. “Not by nature. I have spent a good deal of time in contemplation, however, and have come to be able to sense some of its presence and motions. Not to understand them, of course; the will of the Force is unknowably, even to the Force-sensitive. But I have made myself aware of it.”

 

General Hux rolled his eyes behind the Devotee’s back as the man poured himself tea. He brought it back to his chair with him and sat back down. “Have you come to ask me questions about the force?” the man asked. 

 

“Did you know we were coming?” Phasma asked. She felt jumpy and skittish. She didn’t like this talk of being aware of the Force. She had no idea how General Hux had described in only the vaguest terms what it felt like to be Force-sensitive, and she didn’t really understand the limits of what one could do with the Force, and this blank spot in her strategic knowledge disturbed her.

 

“You? No, not at all,” the man answered. “I don’t even know who you are. But I have thought long about the First Order, and have perceived that the Force moves strangely around it. I thought it was only a matter of time until I would have to cross paths with it. I take it by the way you are both dressed that you belong to the Order?”

 

General Hux had practically snapped to attention, his hands clasped tight behind his back. That wasn’t a good sign. He only did that when he was satisfied that everything was going right or terrified that everything was about to go wrong. Phasma could guess which was the case at that moment. 

 

“The First Order has been infiltrated by Force users,” General Hux said. “I am hoping that your expertise will help me deal with the problem. I am prepared to reward you for information I can use.”

 

The man took a sip of his tea, then tilted his head to the side inquisitively. “Some would say that the presence of the Force is not a problem. But please tell me what you hope to accomplish. Do you want a way to kill Force users? They die the same as any others. To repel them, perhaps?”

 

General Hux shook his head vehemently. He began pacing. Phasma wanted to grab his shoulders and make him stop, but that would do more harm than good. He was too agitated, he was giving too much away. “No, no, that isn’t enough. I want a way to remove the Force from a person. To return them to being ordinary people. To make them ordinary, useful people again.”

 

The Devotee sighed and leaned forward, setting his cup on the little table next to his chair. “You seem to have misunderstood what the Force is.”

 

General Hux stumbled to a stop, staring at the Devotee in disbelief that quickly turned to cold anger. “I assure you, I have done extensive research on the topic.”

 

The Devotee smiled brightly. “Not enough, apparently.”

 

“Oh, really? Care to enlighten me, then?” General Hux said in a barely restrained voice. 

 

The Devotee looked up at the ceiling, steepling his fingers in front of his face as if he was a teacher about to impart a lesson. General Hux bristled, clenching his fists at his sides, but the Devotee ignored him. 

 

“The Force,” he said calmly, “is not a parasite. It isn’t an infection that only a few people carry.” General Hux ground his teeth. Phasma knew that he had been thinking of the Force in exactly those terms. “The Force moves through the universe, and through everything in it. It is true that it can collect and eddy around certain places, but it is _everywhere_. There is as much of the Force in me as there is in any Force-sensitive person. There is a reason it is called being sensitive. Force users simply possess the ability to interact with something that is there for everyone.”

 

General Hux narrowed his eyes. “Then how do you become… how do you _make_ someone insensitive to the Force? You managed to make yourself limitedly sensitive, it must work in the opposite direction.”

 

“A person can open their eyes, but once they are open, it becomes difficult to live an entire lifetime holding them shut,” the Devotee answered. “In theory, and with great effort of will, a person can cut themselves off from the Force, but it is an imperfect process that must be constantly renewed. A Force-sensitive person’s consciousness will be always reaching to reestablish the connection. It can only be done by the will of the person in question, and only the most practiced and skilled users of the Force can do it. I have never read of it being done successfully.”

 

General Hux was silent for a long moment, staring down the Devotee as if trying to catch him out in a lie. The Devotee seemed to take no notice, calmly picking up his cup of tea again, blowing across the top of it, and taking a sip. 

 

“So, what you’re telling me,” General Hux finally said, slowly, voice tight with a mix of emotion that Phasma couldn’t untangle, “is that Force-sensitive people don’t get a single damned choice in the matter? Don’t,” he snapped, as the Devotee opened his mouth to answer, “don’t you dare tell me that it’s a gift.”

 

“I wouldn’t say that,” the Devotee said. “It is neither gift nor curse, on the face of it. It simply is. A Force-sensitive person can feel the Force, just as they can see or hear or taste. As with all things, it is what you do with the Force that determines whether it becomes a gift or a curse in your life.”

 

General Hux opened his mouth to say something more, but changed his mind and wheeled to storm out the door of the hut and back into the cold air outside. 

 

The Devotee turned to regard Phasma steadily as she drew her blaster and pointed it at him. 

 

“I apologize for the necessity,” she told him, “but I won’t insult you by suggesting you didn’t realize what he was really asking.”

 

“Necessity?” the Devotee asked with an unworried smile. “Don’t lie to yourself. Who do you think I’m going to tell about your commander’s secret?”

 

“We found you. Others might, as well. He can’t risk word getting around.”

 

“And you will step in to protect him from his own mistakes?” the Devotee asked her.

 

“Whatever it takes,” she answered.

 

“Then you’ll do what you’ve convinced yourself you must.”

 

“I always do what I must,” she said, and pulled the trigger. Then she followed General Hux outside. 

 

He was standing at the base of the ramp up into their shuttle, shoulders hunched against the wind, staring at the ground. She took up a position standing next to him, keeping her eyes moving, scanning the horizon all around. 

 

“Did you…?” he asked vaguely. She nodded. He grimaced. “I made that necessary. I lost control of the situation.”

 

She didn’t deny it. It was true, after all. 

 

“I apologize for putting you in that position, Captain,” he said. His voice was quiet. “And for completely wasting your time. This was… this was my last option. I haven’t turned up anything else, and there is no other source of information besides the Supreme Leader and the Knights of Ren themselves. I’ve hit a wall, I’m afraid.”

 

He wouldn’t look at her. She felt a prickle of anger. He wasn’t allowed to give up, she wouldn’t let him. He was her ally, and she wanted him put back the way he should be: clever, ruthless, and entirely dependable. 

 

“Sir,” she said, so he’d look up, and then, making sure he was watching and telegraphing her movements so he’d have a chance to move away if he wanted to, she leaned in toward him and gently bumped against his shoulder with her own. She remembered the same contact the night after she’d killed his father, the first night they’d shared a drink together. 

 

Neither of them flinched away this time. He rocked slightly on his heels, eyes wide and mouth open with surprise, then he sighed and leaned toward her, pushing back against her shoulder with his. She hardly felt it behind her armor. 

 

They stood like that for a moment, shoulders barely touching, as she tried to think of what to say. 

 

“Sir,” she settled on, finally, “holding a blaster doesn’t make you a soldier. The Force is just a weapon, just a tool. It isn’t who you are, any more than the knife in your sleeve is.”

 

He looked up at her, brow furrowed. “How do you know about…?”

 

She laughed. “I know everything, sir,” she answered, and he rolled his eyes at her. At least that was an improvement. “Even Starkiller isn’t _you_. They’re all just weapons. I know you, sir. I know you better than anyone.” She wasn’t sure whether she meant that she knew him better than anyone else did or that she knew him better than she knew anyone else, but she supposed both were true. “Holding this weapon won’t change who you are. And if anyone is stubborn enough to shut out the Force, it’s you, sir. You’re not Lord Ren. You’re a good soldier. Nothing has changed about you.”

 

He hung his head, but he was smiling slightly. “You trust me not to throw a tantrum and blow up something vital on the ship?”

 

She nodded. “I do.”

 

“I’m glad, Captain. Thank you. I… Just, thank you.” He took a deep breath, then said, “We should get off this rock.”

 

She followed him up the ramp and back into the cockpit, taking her place in the co-pilot’s seat. He put his hands on the controls but didn’t start the ship. 

 

“Captain Phasma,” he said, looking straight ahead.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Should I ever start… start resembling Lord Ren, start to put my own desires or the… the will of the Force, or whatever idiotic thing, ahead of the needs of the First Order… I hope you’ll recognize that I am no longer myself, and will assist me by doing what is necessary.”

 

She sighed and took off her helmet, staring steadily at the side of his head until he finally gave in and turned to meet her eyes.

 

“Sir,” she said, keeping her tone even despite the roil in her mind and the sick feeling in her stomach. “I understand. And I’ll follow your orders. But I… I will follow this order only if there is no other option. None at all.”

 

“Of course, Captain,” General Hux said, giving a sharp nod and turning back to the controls. He already seemed a bit more himself. “I leave it up to your discretion. Let’s call it the order of last resort.”

 

As the shuttle rose from the planet’s surface and angled toward orbit, she pushed the order of last resort out of her mind and forced herself to think about something else. She looked out the window at the ground dropping away below them, ignoring the fact that she could tell he was watching her out of the corner of his eyes.

 

Finally, as they began to breach the atmosphere, he cleared his throat and said, awkwardly, “This planet is strange, Captain. I wonder why the moss only grows on some of the rocks and not others.”

 

She looked over at him in surprise. He didn’t like being planetside much, and he never paid attention to those sorts of things. Why would he ask her a question like that? 

 

She remembered the conversation they’d had the day Colonel Vengal had died, the relief she’d felt, the freedom from what had never stopped feeling like a weight hanging over her, the sharp-edged sense of justice. It had made her want to talk. It had felt good to let herself do so.

 

She hadn’t thought he’d remember something like that. She hadn’t thought it would have made an impression.

 

She leaned her head back against the seat, smiling slightly. “I’ve never been on this planet before, sir, but I’ve been on a few that were somewhat similar. I made some observations.”

 

She talked for the next hour, and then, because turnabout was fair play, she asked about the progress on Starkiller and pretended to be interested in the technical details.


	11. Hux and Phasma, 34 and 32

**_Hux and Phasma, 34 and 32_ **

 

In the end, at what felt like the end of the galaxy itself, he pulled her out of the wreckage of the _Supremacy_ and onto his personal shuttle, burning his hands against her armor in the places where it was still hot from the flames. The Supreme Leader’s grand ship was collapsing around them, and she was heavy in her armor, but he was still riding the adrenaline high that had come when he’d found the signal from the tracker in her helmet and realized that she was in a part of the ship that was still pressurized. There had still been hope, if he hurried.

 

She came back to consciousness in slow stages, aware first of pain, then of the presence of someone else nearby, muttering to themselves. She cracked her eyes, giving herself a moment to get used to the light stabbing into them, then slowly opened them. She was sitting in a chair in a cramped room that she didn’t recognize, and Hux was crouched in front of her, fiddling with a medkit on the floor.

 

Hux noticed her watching him and put his hands on her shoulders to keep her from attempting to stand up. “Wait, wait, don’t,” he said, “you fell a long way. Your wrist was broken and your ribs were bruised. They’ve been set, but I wanted to… You’ve been burned. Something broke through your helmet, you’ve sustained burns to your face.” He frowned. “We’re on my shuttle. The medical facilities here aren’t as good as a real medbay. You’ll, you’ll scar, I’m sorry.”

 

She shook her head, noticing the dull throbbing pain on the side of her face, the feel and smell of bacta spread across her cheek and around her eye. One of her hands felt heavier than the other; looking down, she saw that her left wrist was encased in a quick-forming cast. Hux was holding his hands just off her shoulders, making abortive movements toward her face as if he wasn’t sure what else to do, and she noticed that his fingers and palms were clumsily bandaged.

 

“I already have scars, it’s not a problem,” she said, her voice grating against her throat. Smoke inhalation, probably; her helmet wouldn’t have been able to filter everything out, especially if it had been damaged. “You’re injured, too, sir. Why aren’t we both in a proper medbay?”

 

“I didn’t want him to see. The Supreme Leader, I mean. I didn’t want him to see me divert resources to a rescue that might not even be successful. I didn’t want him to see me come back for you. I didn’t want him to know how much I wanted to come back for you.”

 

General Hux was talking fast, hanging his head so that she couldn’t get a good view of his face. She was baffled, trying to make sense of what he was talking about. 

 

“Snoke?” she croaked out.

 

He shook his head sharply. “Snoke is dead. Lord Ren is the Supreme Leader now.”

 

Shocked, she moved to try to catch his eye, shuffled into his space so that he was forced to back up a bit and look up at her in the process. She sucked in a breath in a combination of shock and white-hot rage. 

 

Mottled blue bruises covered the left side of his face from his temple to his cheekbone, circling around his eye socket. The bruise on his throat, however, was not mottled, but a uniform purple so dark it was almost black, as if something had been drawn tight in a ring around all the way around with unnatural evenness. She had never seen a bruise like that, but she could guess what had made it. 

 

She lifted a hand toward his face, dropped it into her lap again. He leaned toward her, but hissed in pain when he moved. She looked him over, studying the way he carried himself. “Your ribs?” she asked.

 

He nodded miserably. “Two fractured, I think. He, um… He threw me against the wall of the walker we were in.”

 

A walker would have a crew. A crew that would have seen her commanding officer be hurt like that, treated with such disrespect. Phasma grit her teeth hard enough to send pain lancing through the burned side of her face and deep into her skull.

 

Hux saw this and assumed she was gritting her teeth because of the discomfort of her injuries. “I can give you something for the pain,” he offered. She shook her head tightly. He could understood that; he himself hadn’t taken anything, his heart still pounding with too much fear and adrenaline to bear the thought of having his senses dulled. The idea that he might make a mistake, not patch her up properly, cause her more pain, made him sick to his stomach. 

 

“Captain, what, what happened? Who… How…?” He couldn’t even finish a thought. Now that she was awake, talking to him, now that he was sure she’d survive, he felt the way he did after he went without sleep for days.

 

“FN-2187,” she answered. “When we were hit, whatever hit the ship, he got free. We fought. He won.”

 

“How is that possible?” Hux said without thinking, it was so automatic to reject the idea that anyone could defeat her. He wished he hadn’t said it when she looked away in shame.

 

“His accomplice helped distract me,” she said. “And he was always a good fighter. He was excellent, he had so much potential. And it…” she breathed out shakily. “It felt the way it did on Starkiller.”

 

She swallowed hard, remembering that moment when her mind had seemed to slow and stretch and dull, the fear of what was happening mingled with the building desire to simply allow it, do what was asked. There had been a blaster pointed at her, but that should never have swayed her. She’d gone into so many battles, willing to die if that was what it took to win. But when FN-2187 had told her to disable the shields, to use the codes that she only knew because her commanding officer had trusted her with them, she had done it. She had raged and railed inside her own head, had tried to let him know how much she hated and disdained him, but she’d done what he had ordered her to do. 

 

“I’m more sure than ever, sir,” she said. “All through my fight with him, everything I did was just a half-step too slow, too unfocused. He has abilities, although I have no idea how they compare to Ren’s or the scavenger girl’s.”

 

“Captain,” he started, but he had no idea how to finish the sentence. She had told him immediately what had happened between her and FN-2187 on Starkiller, and he had of course recognized that she was right, and that there had to be something unnatural about it. She would never have given up those codes otherwise. 

 

But he hadn’t had a single real conversation with her in the weeks since. He had told himself that he was just too busy chasing down the Resistance, but he knew that was a lie. He’d felt betrayed, even though he knew it wasn’t her fault, and the weight of losing what he’d worked so hard on, what he’d wanted so badly, was so great that it felt like it was constantly crushing him. 

 

He’d avoided her, and he regretted it now so desperately that it made him breathless, like all the air was being blocked from his lungs all over again. Starkiller had been his command, and its destruction could only have been his fault, and he had taken it out on her like a child who couldn’t face his own failings. _She could have died_ , he kept thinking, _you could have lost her, she could have died_. 

 

Instead of saying anything, because he didn’t even know what he wanted to say, he put one hand on her shoulder. After a moment, she put her own unbandaged hand on top of his.

 

“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said. “After what happened on Starkiller, I… Not that you aren’t… I shouldn’t have left you. I just shouldn’t have left you there.”

 

“You had other things to attend to, sir,” Phasma responded. “It shouldn’t have been a problem.” She knew that he didn’t blame her for Starkiller, not really, but it had still hurt, the past few weeks, to know that she had nothing to look forward to at the end of her shifts but her own company. What had hurt even more was knowing that she deserved it. 

 

After all, with or without the Force, it had been Phasma who had taken down the shields. Every trooper who had died, every one of her FNs who hadn’t made it off the planet, had been her responsibility. The loss of that dream she’d once had, of peace and order and a long life, had been her responsibility. Even if General Hux was ready to forgive her, she wasn’t.

 

“I almost didn’t get to you in time,” Hux said, forcing himself to look at the shiny red burns around her left eye and cheek, her face drawn and pale with pain. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

 

“You saved my life, sir,” she said back. She took her hand away from his and just barely touched her fingers to the bruises on his face. “He did this to you?” she asked. “Ren?” Hux nodded miserably. “I wasn’t there,” she whispered. 

 

“I almost shot him,” Hux said, almost as quietly. “He was unconscious, I almost had my blaster out in time. I could have stopped this before it even began. I wasn’t quick enough, I didn’t _think_ quickly enough. I didn’t have control of the situation.”

 

Hux leaned his face against her hand, ignoring the pain of the bruises. “He’ll destroy everything I’ve worked for. Everything. He’ll burn the First Order to the ground. I’ve let everything I believed in slip through my hands.”

 

She had seen him angry and hurt, she had even seen him afraid for his life, but she had never seen him look defeated before. She couldn’t stand it. She wouldn’t allow it. 

 

“No,” she said firmly. 

 

“No? No what?”

 

“No to that, sir. I refuse. I have fought and suffered for the First Order for sixteen years, and I have earned the right to say that I will not serve someone who doesn’t have my damned respect. I will decide who commands me, and it will not be Ren.”

 

Hux shook his head vehemently. “You can’t. Ren doesn’t care about anyone who doesn’t share his obsession with the Force. He won’t care about how important you are to the First Order. If you defy him, he’ll kill you.”

 

“Only if I defy him openly, sir,” Phasma said, keeping her smile small so that it didn’t pull against her burned skin. “I think it’s time we added another name to our list.”

 

He didn’t return her smile. “This would be more dangerous than anything else we’ve done. I can’t ask you to…”

 

“You aren’t asking,” she said, cutting him off. “I am. You aren’t the only one who wants to win. You aren’t the only one who has dreams about an end to this war.”

 

He didn’t say anything in answer for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Phasma, I…” He trailed off, surprised. She was surprised, herself. He had never called her by her name without her rank before. It should have felt insulting, like a denial of how hard she’d fought for her rank. But from him it didn’t. From him it felt entirely different and new.

 

“Armitage,” she said. Even as she was deciding to say it, she was startled by her own nerve in calling him that. It didn’t make him angry, though. No one had called him by his given name since his last, unpleasant conversation with his father. He generally didn’t like hearing it. But it was different when it was her.

 

He winced as he levered himself off the floor and into the chair beside hers, but he was still smiling despite the pain lancing through his ribs. “Well then,” he said, feeling as if he could allow himself to relax for the first time in weeks, “Kylo Ren can be number seven.”

 

“I’m sure he’ll be honored,” Phasma said, making Hux laugh and then press a hand to his side with a groan. “Sorry,” she added. 

 

She didn’t want to destroy this moment, so familiar to her and yet so full of the feeling of starting something brand new, but she knew she had to. She cleared her throat and caught his eye. 

 

“S… Armitage,” she said. “If we are targeting Ren, will you… will you be willing to use every weapon at your disposal? Should the need arise?”

 

He sucked in a sharp breath, looked away from her, looked back. “I’m not sure I’ll know how.”

 

“I can help you train.”

 

“You don’t know how to use the Force either, Phasma.”

 

“No, but I know how to repeat a movement until it becomes muscle memory, and I know how to put all those muscle memories together for use in combat. And I know what the Force can do. I’ll find a way to help you.”

 

“And you’ll… you’ll remember the order of last resort? If you have to?”

 

She swallowed down her reluctance and said, “I will. I promise. But only if I have to.”

 

Hux sighed and nodded. “We’ll both do what we have to. For the sake of the future.”

 

“Agreed.” And then, because she refused to be dragged into self-pity and fear when she had a mission to think about, “But if I help you become Supreme Leader, I’ll expect to be promoted to Major.”

 

Hux grinned at her. “If you help me become Supreme Leader, you’ll be promoted all the way to General, effective immediately.”

 

“I like the sound of that,” she said, leaning back in the chair and letting herself feel her injuries, taking stock of everywhere there was pain, judging how long she could expect to be out of commission, planning how to begin the next phase of the operation. Beside her, Hux did the same. 

 

They sat together in companionable silence, both battered, burned, and bruised, but both with the thought in their minds that, as long as they had an ally, they couldn’t be beaten.


End file.
